It only seems fitting to de-spin your endoresement of spinsanity. Don't get me wrong, it's a generally useful site, but often falls for the same analytic fallacies as sites like snopes.com. You can only rely on it for so much.
I think some of you are missing the point. This has nothing to do with the emergence of voice recognition or anything else. It has to do with the incredible availablity of PC's: When you've had access to the home PC to play 2006's version of Reader Rabbit since you were 3, you don't need typing classes.
Keyboards are now so ubiquitous, that typing classes would be like pencil-writing classes. Most people pick up the skill naturally, and don't need the tried and tested technique for 100wpm. They develop a natural relationship between themselves, their keyboard, and their mouse. For no other reason than necessity, people develop a perfectly reasonable way to interface with their computer--all they need is skills training in the important software.
Nobody's saying you can't have the copyright, but you aren't offering a competitive price for it. Wedding pay well, but nowhere near as well as commercial work that acquires copyright.
Giving you a private use license is what works out well for both parties. The artist keeps his or her copyright, and you get to make all the prints you want. Best of all, you get to do it at just a fraction of the price of what an corporate client would pay. What are you complaining about?
Finally, whenever I've been hired as a programmer, it's been taken for granted that I'm doing "work for hire", and my (copyrighted) source code belongs to the business hiring me for no additional consideration. Not only that, I'm expected to assign any patents I design on the job to the corporation hiring me.
While the case of a photographer is not entirely parallel -- he provides his own tools, and takes the risk of badly developed photos -- I'll maintain that the most important tool used to write code isn't a computer or a compiler, it's in the 1400 grams of brain I bring with me to the task. And if it's a question of creativity, I'll submit that a code writer -- any good code writer -- is as much an artist as any wedding photographer.
As you're one to talk about negotiations, it seems you've been on the bad side of your own. If you're a freelancer, I have no clue why you'd "take for granted" that the copyright on your code goes to your client. Sure, you can give them the source code to do with as they please, but you really should put a clause reserving copyright in your contract. You're far more likely re-use and reference some or all of that code than they are. The same goes for patents. Your clients can receive a license to the patent in exchange for fees and development, but that you remain the patent-holder.
These things are your creations and should remain your creations until there's good reason ($$$ or a lost gig) for them not to be. Definately don't let it be taken for granted.
The only possible exception is if you're an employee and not a freelancer. As an employee, it's far more expected that your employer receives copyright on your work, because they provide you with salary, benefits, and (ideally) long-term security. But the same applies in more traditionally artistic fields like photography, where a staff photographer (distinct from a freelance photographer) usually won't retain copyright anyway.
Aquiring full copyright is typically very expensive in any work-for-hire. Musicians who release copyright to record companies are either desperately starstruck, or getting paid very high fees.
To return to photography, the fees that advertisers and magazines pay to photographers for 10 or 15 images and an easy hour's work are around what this guy wanted to charge you for 6 or 8 hours in front of 100 people. If you think of it that way, you get a better grasp of what he valued his copyright at.
And if you look at writing, illustration, graphic design, or even programming, you'll see that same kind of price gap.
You may have scared the photographer away by requesting their copyright. As an artist, their copyright means a lot to them. It means they can manage the distribution and production of images, re-use them for portfolios, artistic work, collages, commercial work or anything else that suits their fancy. It's what they earn on top of a fee, for having a ultimately unique talent and approach to their craft.
There's no need for you to strip that from them, which is what you are asking for when you ask for their 'copyright'. What you want is a license with reasonably loose restrictions.
It's true that many wedding photographers developed their craft in a day where production costs (for film) were relatively high and the fee they could charge for a wedding was comparatively low. Thus, they retained reprint rights so that they could recoup a better margin over time.
However, this is changing rapidly, largely because of the far lower production cost involved with digital photography, and the emergence of the photojournalistic style. More and more photographers, including my fiance, whom I'm shamelessly promoting, are more than happy to provide you with full resolution digital images for private printing. More often than not, clients who aren't tech savvy, or don't have cost-effective access to professional quality print labs, come back to the original photographer anyway. And even if they don't come back, releasing the images amounts to one less hassle for the photographer five years from now when your mom wants a few new prints.
However, they will usually try to retain copyright, though, since it's often far more valuable to them them than it would be to you.
In summary: don't worry. There are an increasing number of photographers out there who provide exactly what you need. Just keep looking, and good luck on your wedding!
The HTML tag 'LINK' already provides that functionality. Rather than incorporating some fuzzy (and thereby unreliable and incongrous) machine learning thing, just encourage browsers to support a LINK syntax beyond rel="stylesheet"
Without CA's and revocation information, SSL-style (RSA) public key infrastructures are useless. That means every client needs access to recently updated and TRUSTED revocation lists to make sure that no cert's have been forged or stolen. Every meaningful SSL client should periodically verify that any server certificates it uses are and remain valid. Using the CA's public key is absolutely NOT sufficient.
The lead isn't misleading in the slightest, despite all your whining. It clearly states that this was a congenital deformity that many things besides DDR could have triggered. Did you guys even read the lead? Are you just getting inflamed because of the headline? Do we need to start saying RTFL, now?
Shut up, you little whiners.
This was a human interest story that would be accessible to all of you because it incorporated a familiar nerd topic. It helped bring your attention to this unfortunately too common disease, as few other articles could have.
I admitted to that. But the Delta plane isn't running XP, or at least not some run of the mill version. Rather than a $89 user license, Boeing and Airbus invest millions of dollars into software that takes years to test and develop.
Same goes for the car. More developers work on smaller blocks of code with more failsafe techniques. This costs more money and takes more time, but is something that's necessary for that specific industry.
The reliability of consumer and corporate software is not that important to our lives. in those specialized industries where it is more important, they invest more time and money to make sure it works.
When desktop and corporate customers are willing to wait 10 years for products that incorporate new technology, we can talk.
Microsoft is being no more negligent than their competitors would be. Businesses recognize the risk of using Microsoft, Apple, Sun, third-party or OSS software, and balance that against their need to actually use recent innovations. The end result, a fast life-cycle on development and rather unreliable products. Businesses suffer losses when software is compromised, but that's built into the cost of getting software years before it could be released otherwise.
If consumer advocacy laws applied to software development right now, you'd see innovation plummet. What few developers that would bother with top-notch reliability (which is comparitively boring) would still take years to create something after the idea was publically announced.
Meanwhile, some black market developers would create the same function in some illegal and wholly unsupported product, but businesses would buy it up like crazy.
The reason that these kinds of regulations are important with cars and pharmaceuticals is that these industries put people at risk to their lives. A flaw in a car will kill people. A flaw in software will cost a company some money, but is a threat that can be overcome through market practices. The company insures against damage, pays a premium, and gets reimbursed on loss. Nobody dies. Big fricking deal.
Businesses where reliability does matter (i.e. infrastructure and medical projects) go further and independently make sure they only use software that has gone through the ropes. This software tends to evolve more slowly, or else has a disproportionate amount of money thrown against it to speed things up.
Since you didn't give me much to go off, here's what you say in the anti-spam part of your website:
Bulk email is perfectly acceptable as long as the recipients are willing.
Bingo. Those are the people I've been talking about. People who send bulk email in complete accordance with the perfectly reasonable opt-in laws. Maybe they make up a minority of spammers, but they're out their and there's no reason they should receive the abuse that people throw at spammers as a whole. You should be fighting against bad practices, not the whole thing. Otherwise you risk framing the problem wrong and putting yourself into a no-win situation.
Then why do you spammers go to great lengths to dodge around every attempt we make to avoid your deluge of sludge? Isn't the mere fact that someone filters out emails with the phrase "penis enlargement" in them just possibly a clue that the person is not a likely buyer of penis enlargement pills? Because they don't know whether or why a filter's there, or even whether you or your ISP put it there. Even legitimate, non-commercial mailing lists have to fight against filters now...
Yet you persist. You find new tricks. You use fake "personal" emails... fake bounce messages... using images to replace keywords... irrelevant words to fool filters... false subjects, false senders, false headers, false everything... and, of course, using "remove" addresses for validation.
Yeah, you really don't want to spam people who don't want your sludge.
And please don't use "you". I'm not a spammer. I just know some well enough to be an aplogist for those particular ones. Yes, there are "evil" spammers who do plainly illegal things, but there are also some that are just well-meaning and creative businessmen trying to make a buck.
They work towards efficient prospect lists, avoid stealing relays (theft), avoid using other people's from addresses (fraud), and other such things. Yes, they use some of the tricks you mentioned to defeat filters, but mostly because the filters are too restrictive. In many cases, the filters aren't even optional for users. It's rarely the user who put in the filter, but the ISP; the marketer has no way to know, and therefore works to circumvent the filter.
You're right. Some of them are evil. The scammers, the relay theives, and the people who forge your address as your return really are evil. We're both guilty of over-generalizing.
While some use the above practices, others are just operating creative businesses as legitimate entrepreneurs. They're creepy "SELL!!! SELL!!! SELL!!!" people, just like the one's who produce infomercials and "No Money Down Real Estate" seminars, but they aren't all evil.
Actually, I would argue that using an open mail relay without concent of the owner of the system it runs on is a criminal act. You have no right to use a system someone else owns without their consent, and if you do so, that is a criminal act. In fact, that defines a great number of criminal acts, appropriating someone else's property for your own use. Be it computational resource or physical one, it is still criminal.
I completely agree. My post was referring to spammers who are following the letter of the law. Theft is criminal, fraud is now criminal, using stolen addresses is now criminal, but sending direct marketing to public email addresses is not criminal.
The only way this would be identical to direct mailing or telemarketing is if, god forbid, they ran their own servers and sent their massive spam blasts. If they did this, then it would not be a criminal act. They won't, however, because that would mean that it would be trivial for most people not wanting spam to blacklist their servers.
But they do, because it's not so trivial to blacklist them. You blacklist IP's, not servers, and IP's can be passed around. In fact, you can even pay people to host spambots on their home computers. There are plenty of people eager to receive a few tens of dollars a month for no effort of their own. The spammers, even the legal ones, are lightyears ahead of intuitive thought on this topic.
In fact, here's something that everybody forgets: spammers don't want to spam you. Their interest isn't in using your resources, it's in turning a profit. Vehement anti-spammers don't buy the products and services advertised in spam, so why would they bother advertising to them?
What we really need is a registry of spam-unfriendly email addresses. I know it sounds ridiculous, because you think spammers will just use the list to hit you even more... but it's not. If they can go from a 1% success rate using a purchased list to a 15% success rate by easily subtracting a list of known anti-spammers, they'll do it.
Heck, a reputable group like the EFF could host an anti-spam email list and do the subtraction internally so that the spammers never need to see the list...
1) EFF aggregates list of spam-unfriendly addresses. 2) Spammer submits prospect addresses to EFF. 3) EFF returns list minus spam-unfriendly addresses. 4) Spammer only markets to the rest of the list.
The value of a mailing list corresponds to it's accuracy as well as any supplementary information it contains (interests, habits, geography, etc.).
When you say actual reachability is a moot point you're completely wrong. Actual reachability is a very important point.
If a spammer knows that an address is good, that the person on the receiving end reads the messages, and that they're generally interested in the kind of product being pitched, they'll pay a lot more.
If a spammer doesn't know anything about an address, or suspects it's just a generated address, they'll pay a lot less. At least if they're reasonably savvy marketers.
1) Your single message may only go out through one or two proxies. Remember that the spammer you hire has other jobs running, and has many choices as to how to distribute the load.
2) Spam proxies are generally short-lived or part of a dynamic pool of addresses that it might not be appropriate to block. Some are also just corporate machines that were poorly administered (open relays). You may inadvertantly block regular people from getting email to you.
3) It would be easier to just buy a list of proxies and block them, if you really want to go that route.
4) Generally speaking, you'd provide a third-party spammer with a message and maybe a set of target criteria, not an email list. If you had a list and a message, you could just use a mailing list manager. The spammers value comes from the vast quantitity of addresses.
A spammer profits while internet resources are criminally misused, communities are destroyed and individual health and safety (via virii) are compromised.
The costs these fucktards incur upon everyone else leaves us with a wasteland. If it weren't for vigilant individuals spending their free time trying to fight the problem, the internet would probably die
Oh, woe is me.
First of all, until recently no internet resource were being "criminally misused". Spam is fundamentally identical to telemarketing and direct postal mail. You publish a means of contact and people who believe they have something you would be interested in contact you. Yes, spam is more of a problem because bandwidth and computation is much cheaper than telephone lines, postage, printing. So now it's being made criminal, but even within the bounds of current law, you can receive a lot of marketing email. Don't misuse the word criminal, please.
The fact is that direct marketing sells. People buy the products that are advertised. This seems to indicate that they may actually be promoting products that people find of value. Does that make them the scum of the earth? No, it makes them annoying to people who were poorly targetted. Those are not the same thing.
Spam is moderately annoying. It is not destructive. It is not particularly wasteful, except of your time. And it certainly doesn't compromise individual health and safety. Spam is almost always just direct marketing, and is not the same thing as propogating virii or Nigerian scams. Conflating the two (annoying marketing vs. the evil stuff) only makes it harder to efficiently dedicate resources to the ones that really need to be addressed.
But beyond that, legal spam doesn't make the internet a wasteland. It subsidizes it. I know you don't want to believe that, but it's true. When you give your email to a website operator, and that website operator sells it, that money is what keeps your content cheap or free. It's just like television and newspapers.
If you want to avoid spam, do the same thing you'd do with advertising on TV: stop taking advantage of its products. Either buy content at a high enough markup that operators needn't sell your address, or use publically funded content. But don't expect to eradicate internet advertising while still getting everything for free. It just can't work that way..
Why would I encourage users to aggregate all their personal data with some unknown startup?
The two options already available are both (at least marginally) better. Those options being: collecting minimal personal data at my site, or using a well-known and industry-monitored company as the aggregate.
If Yahoo! or Microsoft ran off with user data, at least they'd have something to lose. The same can't be said about MyUID. They could collect data for six months then run off and sell it to illegal immigrant smugglers. Who knows? They have no reputation, no history, and nothing to lose.
And I guess it's not so bad if they just stick with UID/Password and not personal data, but I'd still sooner wait for a reputable company who chose to open the API.
And likewise, I hope your five year old daughter gets her copy of the "Huge Black Pole in Little White Holes" spam ad, complete with moving gif of a giant black man ramming a screaming red-head woman in the ass. And hopefully she'll be able to sit and watch it bang back and forth for a few minutes before you hear "Daddy, why is that woman crying like that?" and have come in and have to explain it all to her.. Ha ha ha!
It's funny because you are taking yourself too seriously! Get it? Get it?
You said it!
My five year old daughter (if I had one) wouldn't have an unscreened email account to receive sex ads on! Ha! Ha! Ha! Because I actually have common sense! Ha Ha Ha!
Seriously, dude (/ma'am). Spam is the last thing you need to worry about showing up in your daughter's email. You should be more concerned about the scam artists and sexual predators that demonstrate a real threat to your child, and monitor what she's doing online.
Your lack of touch with what's really important is what's funny. You're so caught up in the anti-spam fad that you don't see the real problems that you need to deal with.
The point of the both Crossballs and the mock-interviews on The Daily Show is (usually) to be funny. One very effective way to be funny is to ridicule people who take themselves too seriously.
I mean, the guy wrote this to introduce us to his story:
asking for my help to educate the world's youth about important topics (in this case, the scourge of spam).
Unsolicited advertising is an important topic for the world's youth? A scourge?
The AIDS epidemic is a scourge. Genocide is a scourge. A brash president that disregards diplomacy might be a scourge.
But getting some extra emails? That's not a scourge, and if you believe it is, you deserve to be ridiculed. Mr. Weinstein was so eager to spread his anti-spam gospel to the tortured masses that he only needed $200 and a cab for compensation. You know what? That's funny!
Comedy lets us point out the things that are out of place. People who think spam is a scourge are out of place. People who want 14 year old to have a 1/4 are out of place. Administrations that are accumulating scandals faster than people can grasp them are out of place. And so we laugh at them.
I'm sorry, but since when is a tiny 5.2 earthquake followed by an aftershock at the same location even notable?
5.2's are nothing in Southern California, and you can see a map that looks exactly like that maybe once every month or two.
I imagine that what probably threw people off is the extra earthquake that was originally reported by the USGS. That one was supposed to be centered near Lancaster, or some such, but it wasn't long before they took back the claim on grounds of instrument error.
And there's the rub. Microsoft began filing for this patent in 1999. Intellij may actually have to double check that it's not doing the same thing. In fact, because Intellij came up with it so late, it wouldn't be prior art, it would be infringement. You might want to mention that to the maintainers/developers.
Slashdot Mirror
It only seems fitting to de-spin your endoresement of spinsanity. Don't get me wrong, it's a generally useful site, but often falls for the same analytic fallacies as sites like snopes.com. You can only rely on it for so much.
I think some of you are missing the point. This has nothing to do with the emergence of voice recognition or anything else. It has to do with the incredible availablity of PC's: When you've had access to the home PC to play 2006's version of Reader Rabbit since you were 3, you don't need typing classes.
Keyboards are now so ubiquitous, that typing classes would be like pencil-writing classes. Most people pick up the skill naturally, and don't need the tried and tested technique for 100wpm. They develop a natural relationship between themselves, their keyboard, and their mouse. For no other reason than necessity, people develop a perfectly reasonable way to interface with their computer--all they need is skills training in the important software.
Nobody's saying you can't have the copyright, but you aren't offering a competitive price for it. Wedding pay well, but nowhere near as well as commercial work that acquires copyright.
Giving you a private use license is what works out well for both parties. The artist keeps his or her copyright, and you get to make all the prints you want. Best of all, you get to do it at just a fraction of the price of what an corporate client would pay. What are you complaining about?
Finally, whenever I've been hired as a programmer, it's been taken for granted that I'm doing "work for hire", and my (copyrighted) source code belongs to the business hiring me for no additional consideration. Not only that, I'm expected to assign any patents I design on the job to the corporation hiring me.
While the case of a photographer is not entirely parallel -- he provides his own tools, and takes the risk of badly developed photos -- I'll maintain that the most important tool used to write code isn't a computer or a compiler, it's in the 1400 grams of brain I bring with me to the task. And if it's a question of creativity, I'll submit that a code writer -- any good code writer -- is as much an artist as any wedding photographer.
As you're one to talk about negotiations, it seems you've been on the bad side of your own. If you're a freelancer, I have no clue why you'd "take for granted" that the copyright on your code goes to your client. Sure, you can give them the source code to do with as they please, but you really should put a clause reserving copyright in your contract. You're far more likely re-use and reference some or all of that code than they are. The same goes for patents. Your clients can receive a license to the patent in exchange for fees and development, but that you remain the patent-holder.
These things are your creations and should remain your creations until there's good reason ($$$ or a lost gig) for them not to be. Definately don't let it be taken for granted.
The only possible exception is if you're an employee and not a freelancer. As an employee, it's far more expected that your employer receives copyright on your work, because they provide you with salary, benefits, and (ideally) long-term security. But the same applies in more traditionally artistic fields like photography, where a staff photographer (distinct from a freelance photographer) usually won't retain copyright anyway.
And to answer your questions more directly:
Aquiring full copyright is typically very expensive in any work-for-hire. Musicians who release copyright to record companies are either desperately starstruck, or getting paid very high fees.
To return to photography, the fees that advertisers and magazines pay to photographers for 10 or 15 images and an easy hour's work are around what this guy wanted to charge you for 6 or 8 hours in front of 100 people. If you think of it that way, you get a better grasp of what he valued his copyright at.
And if you look at writing, illustration, graphic design, or even programming, you'll see that same kind of price gap.
You may have scared the photographer away by requesting their copyright. As an artist, their copyright means a lot to them. It means they can manage the distribution and production of images, re-use them for portfolios, artistic work, collages, commercial work or anything else that suits their fancy. It's what they earn on top of a fee, for having a ultimately unique talent and approach to their craft.
There's no need for you to strip that from them, which is what you are asking for when you ask for their 'copyright'. What you want is a license with reasonably loose restrictions.
It's true that many wedding photographers developed their craft in a day where production costs (for film) were relatively high and the fee they could charge for a wedding was comparatively low. Thus, they retained reprint rights so that they could recoup a better margin over time.
However, this is changing rapidly, largely because of the far lower production cost involved with digital photography, and the emergence of the photojournalistic style. More and more photographers, including my fiance, whom I'm shamelessly promoting, are more than happy to provide you with full resolution digital images for private printing. More often than not, clients who aren't tech savvy, or don't have cost-effective access to professional quality print labs, come back to the original photographer anyway. And even if they don't come back, releasing the images amounts to one less hassle for the photographer five years from now when your mom wants a few new prints.
However, they will usually try to retain copyright, though, since it's often far more valuable to them them than it would be to you.
In summary: don't worry. There are an increasing number of photographers out there who provide exactly what you need. Just keep looking, and good luck on your wedding!
The HTML tag 'LINK' already provides that functionality. Rather than incorporating some fuzzy (and thereby unreliable and incongrous) machine learning thing, just encourage browsers to support a LINK syntax beyond rel="stylesheet"
No infrastructure? No talking to servers? Que?
Without CA's and revocation information, SSL-style (RSA) public key infrastructures are useless. That means every client needs access to recently updated and TRUSTED revocation lists to make sure that no cert's have been forged or stolen. Every meaningful SSL client should periodically verify that any server certificates it uses are and remain valid. Using the CA's public key is absolutely NOT sufficient.
The lead isn't misleading in the slightest, despite all your whining. It clearly states that this was a congenital deformity that many things besides DDR could have triggered. Did you guys even read the lead? Are you just getting inflamed because of the headline? Do we need to start saying RTFL, now?
Shut up, you little whiners.
This was a human interest story that would be accessible to all of you because it incorporated a familiar nerd topic. It helped bring your attention to this unfortunately too common disease, as few other articles could have.
Idiots.
So what's the point of the census?
I admitted to that. But the Delta plane isn't running XP, or at least not some run of the mill version. Rather than a $89 user license, Boeing and Airbus invest millions of dollars into software that takes years to test and develop.
Same goes for the car. More developers work on smaller blocks of code with more failsafe techniques. This costs more money and takes more time, but is something that's necessary for that specific industry.
The reliability of consumer and corporate software is not that important to our lives. in those specialized industries where it is more important, they invest more time and money to make sure it works.
When desktop and corporate customers are willing to wait 10 years for products that incorporate new technology, we can talk.
Microsoft is being no more negligent than their competitors would be. Businesses recognize the risk of using Microsoft, Apple, Sun, third-party or OSS software, and balance that against their need to actually use recent innovations. The end result, a fast life-cycle on development and rather unreliable products. Businesses suffer losses when software is compromised, but that's built into the cost of getting software years before it could be released otherwise.
If consumer advocacy laws applied to software development right now, you'd see innovation plummet. What few developers that would bother with top-notch reliability (which is comparitively boring) would still take years to create something after the idea was publically announced.
Meanwhile, some black market developers would create the same function in some illegal and wholly unsupported product, but businesses would buy it up like crazy.
The reason that these kinds of regulations are important with cars and pharmaceuticals is that these industries put people at risk to their lives. A flaw in a car will kill people. A flaw in software will cost a company some money, but is a threat that can be overcome through market practices. The company insures against damage, pays a premium, and gets reimbursed on loss. Nobody dies. Big fricking deal.
Businesses where reliability does matter (i.e. infrastructure and medical projects) go further and independently make sure they only use software that has gone through the ropes. This software tends to evolve more slowly, or else has a disproportionate amount of money thrown against it to speed things up.
Since you didn't give me much to go off, here's what you say in the anti-spam part of your website:
Bulk email is perfectly acceptable as long as the recipients are willing.
Bingo. Those are the people I've been talking about. People who send bulk email in complete accordance with the perfectly reasonable opt-in laws. Maybe they make up a minority of spammers, but they're out their and there's no reason they should receive the abuse that people throw at spammers as a whole. You should be fighting against bad practices, not the whole thing. Otherwise you risk framing the problem wrong and putting yourself into a no-win situation.
Then why do you spammers go to great lengths to dodge around every attempt we make to avoid your deluge of sludge? Isn't the mere fact that someone filters out emails with the phrase "penis enlargement" in them just possibly a clue that the person is not a likely buyer of penis enlargement pills?
... fake bounce messages ... using images to replace keywords ... irrelevant words to fool filters ... false subjects, false senders, false headers, false everything ... and, of course, using "remove" addresses for validation.
Because they don't know whether or why a filter's there, or even whether you or your ISP put it there. Even legitimate, non-commercial mailing lists have to fight against filters now...
Yet you persist. You find new tricks. You use fake "personal" emails
Yeah, you really don't want to spam people who don't want your sludge.
And please don't use "you". I'm not a spammer. I just know some well enough to be an aplogist for those particular ones. Yes, there are "evil" spammers who do plainly illegal things, but there are also some that are just well-meaning and creative businessmen trying to make a buck.
They work towards efficient prospect lists, avoid stealing relays (theft), avoid using other people's from addresses (fraud), and other such things. Yes, they use some of the tricks you mentioned to defeat filters, but mostly because the filters are too restrictive. In many cases, the filters aren't even optional for users. It's rarely the user who put in the filter, but the ISP; the marketer has no way to know, and therefore works to circumvent the filter.
You're right. Some of them are evil. The scammers, the relay theives, and the people who forge your address as your return really are evil. We're both guilty of over-generalizing.
While some use the above practices, others are just operating creative businesses as legitimate entrepreneurs. They're creepy "SELL!!! SELL!!! SELL!!!" people, just like the one's who produce infomercials and "No Money Down Real Estate" seminars, but they aren't all evil.
Known good doesn't matter if they're known useless.
Actually, I would argue that using an open mail relay without concent of the owner of the system it runs on is a criminal act. You have no right to use a system someone else owns without their consent, and if you do so, that is a criminal act. In fact, that defines a great number of criminal acts, appropriating someone else's property for your own use. Be it computational resource or physical one, it is still criminal.
I completely agree. My post was referring to spammers who are following the letter of the law. Theft is criminal, fraud is now criminal, using stolen addresses is now criminal, but sending direct marketing to public email addresses is not criminal.
The only way this would be identical to direct mailing or telemarketing is if, god forbid, they ran their own servers and sent their massive spam blasts. If they did this, then it would not be a criminal act. They won't, however, because that would mean that it would be trivial for most people not wanting spam to blacklist their servers.
But they do, because it's not so trivial to blacklist them. You blacklist IP's, not servers, and IP's can be passed around. In fact, you can even pay people to host spambots on their home computers. There are plenty of people eager to receive a few tens of dollars a month for no effort of their own. The spammers, even the legal ones, are lightyears ahead of intuitive thought on this topic.
In fact, here's something that everybody forgets: spammers don't want to spam you. Their interest isn't in using your resources, it's in turning a profit. Vehement anti-spammers don't buy the products and services advertised in spam, so why would they bother advertising to them?
What we really need is a registry of spam-unfriendly email addresses. I know it sounds ridiculous, because you think spammers will just use the list to hit you even more... but it's not. If they can go from a 1% success rate using a purchased list to a 15% success rate by easily subtracting a list of known anti-spammers, they'll do it.
Heck, a reputable group like the EFF could host an anti-spam email list and do the subtraction internally so that the spammers never need to see the list...
1) EFF aggregates list of spam-unfriendly addresses.
2) Spammer submits prospect addresses to EFF.
3) EFF returns list minus spam-unfriendly addresses.
4) Spammer only markets to the rest of the list.
They're not evil. They're capitalists.
The value of a mailing list corresponds to it's accuracy as well as any supplementary information it contains (interests, habits, geography, etc.).
When you say actual reachability is a moot point you're completely wrong. Actual reachability is a very important point.
If a spammer knows that an address is good, that the person on the receiving end reads the messages, and that they're generally interested in the kind of product being pitched, they'll pay a lot more.
If a spammer doesn't know anything about an address, or suspects it's just a generated address, they'll pay a lot less. At least if they're reasonably savvy marketers.
A few problems:
1) Your single message may only go out through one or two proxies. Remember that the spammer you hire has other jobs running, and has many choices as to how to distribute the load.
2) Spam proxies are generally short-lived or part of a dynamic pool of addresses that it might not be appropriate to block. Some are also just corporate machines that were poorly administered (open relays). You may inadvertantly block regular people from getting email to you.
3) It would be easier to just buy a list of proxies and block them, if you really want to go that route.
4) Generally speaking, you'd provide a third-party spammer with a message and maybe a set of target criteria, not an email list. If you had a list and a message, you could just use a mailing list manager. The spammers value comes from the vast quantitity of addresses.
A spammer profits while internet resources are criminally misused, communities are destroyed and individual health and safety (via virii) are compromised.
The costs these fucktards incur upon everyone else leaves us with a wasteland. If it weren't for vigilant individuals spending their free time trying to fight the problem, the internet would probably die
Oh, woe is me.
First of all, until recently no internet resource were being "criminally misused". Spam is fundamentally identical to telemarketing and direct postal mail. You publish a means of contact and people who believe they have something you would be interested in contact you. Yes, spam is more of a problem because bandwidth and computation is much cheaper than telephone lines, postage, printing. So now it's being made criminal, but even within the bounds of current law, you can receive a lot of marketing email. Don't misuse the word criminal, please.
The fact is that direct marketing sells. People buy the products that are advertised. This seems to indicate that they may actually be promoting products that people find of value. Does that make them the scum of the earth? No, it makes them annoying to people who were poorly targetted. Those are not the same thing.
Spam is moderately annoying. It is not destructive. It is not particularly wasteful, except of your time. And it certainly doesn't compromise individual health and safety. Spam is almost always just direct marketing, and is not the same thing as propogating virii or Nigerian scams. Conflating the two (annoying marketing vs. the evil stuff) only makes it harder to efficiently dedicate resources to the ones that really need to be addressed.
But beyond that, legal spam doesn't make the internet a wasteland. It subsidizes it. I know you don't want to believe that, but it's true. When you give your email to a website operator, and that website operator sells it, that money is what keeps your content cheap or free. It's just like television and newspapers.
If you want to avoid spam, do the same thing you'd do with advertising on TV: stop taking advantage of its products. Either buy content at a high enough markup that operators needn't sell your address, or use publically funded content. But don't expect to eradicate internet advertising while still getting everything for free. It just can't work that way..
Why would I encourage users to aggregate all their personal data with some unknown startup?
The two options already available are both (at least marginally) better. Those options being: collecting minimal personal data at my site, or using a well-known and industry-monitored company as the aggregate.
If Yahoo! or Microsoft ran off with user data, at least they'd have something to lose. The same can't be said about MyUID. They could collect data for six months then run off and sell it to illegal immigrant smugglers. Who knows? They have no reputation, no history, and nothing to lose.
And I guess it's not so bad if they just stick with UID/Password and not personal data, but I'd still sooner wait for a reputable company who chose to open the API.
And likewise, I hope your five year old daughter gets her copy of the "Huge Black Pole in Little White Holes" spam ad, complete with moving gif of a giant black man ramming a screaming red-head woman in the ass. And hopefully she'll be able to sit and watch it bang back and forth for a few minutes before you hear "Daddy, why is that woman crying like that?" and have come in and have to explain it all to her.. Ha ha ha!
It's funny because you are taking yourself too seriously! Get it? Get it?
You said it!
My five year old daughter (if I had one) wouldn't have an unscreened email account to receive sex ads on! Ha! Ha! Ha! Because I actually have common sense! Ha Ha Ha!
Seriously, dude (/ma'am). Spam is the last thing you need to worry about showing up in your daughter's email. You should be more concerned about the scam artists and sexual predators that demonstrate a real threat to your child, and monitor what she's doing online.
Your lack of touch with what's really important is what's funny. You're so caught up in the anti-spam fad that you don't see the real problems that you need to deal with.
The point of the both Crossballs and the mock-interviews on The Daily Show is (usually) to be funny. One very effective way to be funny is to ridicule people who take themselves too seriously.
I mean, the guy wrote this to introduce us to his story:
asking for my help to educate the world's youth about important topics (in this case, the scourge of spam).
Unsolicited advertising is an important topic for the world's youth? A scourge?
The AIDS epidemic is a scourge. Genocide is a scourge. A brash president that disregards diplomacy might be a scourge.
But getting some extra emails? That's not a scourge, and if you believe it is, you deserve to be ridiculed. Mr. Weinstein was so eager to spread his anti-spam gospel to the tortured masses that he only needed $200 and a cab for compensation. You know what? That's funny!
Comedy lets us point out the things that are out of place. People who think spam is a scourge are out of place. People who want 14 year old to have a 1/4 are out of place. Administrations that are accumulating scandals faster than people can grasp them are out of place. And so we laugh at them.
What?
I'm sorry, but since when is a tiny 5.2 earthquake followed by an aftershock at the same location even notable?
5.2's are nothing in Southern California, and you can see a map that looks exactly like that maybe once every month or two.
I imagine that what probably threw people off is the extra earthquake that was originally reported by the USGS. That one was supposed to be centered near Lancaster, or some such, but it wasn't long before they took back the claim on grounds of instrument error.
This editor has been around for more than a year.
And there's the rub. Microsoft began filing for this patent in 1999. Intellij may actually have to double check that it's not doing the same thing. In fact, because Intellij came up with it so late, it wouldn't be prior art, it would be infringement. You might want to mention that to the maintainers/developers.