IANAL, but I'd probably use a lawyer up front, if only to Cease and Desist the fellow. I'd be afraid, doing it myself, that I'd say or do something wrong that would bite me later if I had to resort to a lawsuit.
People generally hate (lawyers|the DMCA), but (they are|it is) a tool you might have to use to fight for your rights.
if you want to catch terrorists, there are two ways: [...] This is like a self fullfilling prophecy. By declaring people to be terrorists you can make them to be.
There's a lot you don't know about the problem, so engineering such a simple question is virtually impossible.
In all honesty, moving Mt. Fuji sounds like a metaphor for large, ill-considered projects that many companies like to undertake to the detriment of their investors.
I would seriously hope that a response in the form of a question, "Why do we want to move Mt. Fuji?", would be accepted as wise, in favor of some blind estimate of how much work it would require.
I've found this true to a certain extent where I work. I'm mainly a C++ developer, but in the past have used PHP, Perl, Tcl, and various shell scripting languages. My current company writes server-side software for mid-sized businesses.
A good example was a couple of months ago, when we needed to process a not-quite-XML file into a well-formed XML document. I suggested a Perl script with a very simple regex that would solve the problem. The Powers That Be decided it would be better to have a different developer (who had the time) spend days building and testing a custom C++ reformatter application rather than less than an hour building and testing a Perl script.
To be fair, some are reluctant to ship scripts because not all clients might want to install the scripting interpreter, but some of this is from FUD about scripting being some kind of back-door into the system.
I'm pretty sure that doesn't cut the legal mustard (at least in the U.S.). If my skim of the JunkBusters [junkbusters.com] site picked up the right info, once you tell them to put you on their do-not-call list they can't call you again for ten years or you can quite easily file some legal papers and get $500 per infringement out of the bastards.
Maintenance of do-not-call lists. A person or entity making telephone solicitations must maintain a record of a caller's request not to receive future telephone solicitations. A do not call request must be honored for 10 years from the time the request is made.
If you just interrupt the telemarketer with "Take me off your list", it'll take a week of calls... MAYBE two, and it'll ALL STOP.
I haven't gotten a telemarketing call in years.
Note that, if you want to take the telemarketers to court for violating your requests, you need to ask for the right thing.
47 CFR 64.1200 requires telemarketers to honor "do not call" requests, but says nothing about requests to "remove [you] from [their] list".
IANAL, but if you issue a "do not call" request, and they violate it more than once, you have private right-of-action in court for at least $500 per violation. This is not available if you continue to demand that they remove you from their phone list.
We've had a couple of single-time violations on telemarketers we've asked Do Not Call, but so far none of them have managed to do it twice.
Yeah, that thing screams false advertising. It sends no frequency over the telephone to delete your call. All it is is a recording that says the phone is disconnected.
It doesn't do that on the version I own. That emits what sounds to the human ear as a single beep, which is apparently the three DTMF tones with very short duration.
The potential for false advertising is that this "tells" the dialer on the other end to remove the number. All it does is pretend to be a dead line, and a sane autodialer would remove such numbers from their queue.
The Telezapper worked great for us, but only for large, nationwide telemarketers. Small local shops that probably use a cheaper per-telemarketer autodialer (instead of a pooled dialer) zoom right past the tone.
I, too, live in Minnesota and have similar results with MN's new Do Not Call list.
We had purchased the Telezapper, which got rid of most of our nationwide telemarketing calls, but not most of the in-state ones for whatever reason. Since 1/1/2003, we have been getting increasing numbers of telemarketing calls, and it seems to us that some telemarketers must be using the list to boost their call volumes. So long as they use the available loopholes, especially the one where they technically don't intend to make a sale over the phone, they seem to be able to legally add those numbers to their phone queues.
Pushed advertising just doesn't work, especially with a medium used for personal and even urgent communication.
Yeah, but as so many have already pointed out, they lose even more money on every xbox they don't sell.
Yes, but that kind of loss is limited to their already-manufactured inventory. If buying Xboxen for Linux use becomes popular, there's the potential for the cumulative sum of losses per sale to exceed what they might have lost in unsold units.
Are their no legaleze terms on the Xbox units that prevent this kind of creative misuse? With the lengths to which they went to secure the Xbox from tampering, and with previous industry experience with unexpected Linux-ized hardware, they would seem (IMHO) to be foolish to not have expected this to happen.
The TrailBlazer will not have enough fuel to raise its orbit again, so we will end the mission by commanding it to impact the surface at a pre-selected location. We will choose this site to be far away from any site of historical interest (e.g. Tranquility Base). During the final descent, we will beam back "barnstorming" video of the approaching lunar surface.
The TrailBlazer probe will be destroyed by the impact, but it will carry a specially hardened capsule that will protect the inert cargoes being carried to the lunar surface.
I rather expect this implies it won't be manned, either.
Forced unsolicited advertising that you can't avoid, because it's being pumped directly into your brain.
We haven't even figured out how to lock down individual computers and LANs from unauthorized access in most cases yet. How can we protect humans hard-wired to computers?
Of course, what we got instead were hyper-agressive, territorial bees; not harder working honey bees. Or something like that.
So what happens when we create this super organism that eats carbon dioxide and craps out twinkies?
An alarmist might think that this would produce large amounts of oxygen from large amounts of carbon dioxide. If these buggers ran amok and produced far too much oxygen, we'd suffer from a different type of Global Warming...
Maybe it's too radical a notion, but we seem to already have life forms on the planet that get rid of carbon dioxide. Plants. Maybe this fellow hasn't heard of them, though.
I find it difficult to believe that no one has informed him of these in the past. Therefore, one has to conclude either that he is (a) stubbornly sticking to open relays due to principles or nostalgia or (b) unable to figure out how to implement these methods.
I'm not sure which is the case, but either way he'll claim (a).
Just because you leave your door unlocked, doesn't mean strangers can legally come into your home. [...] Just because you leave your car unlocked doesn't mean you want it stolen, either.
Even though you many not want your car stolen if you leave it unlocked, and even though strangers can't legally enter your home if you leave it unlocked, anyone who deliberately avoids locking them, just to make a statement, shouldn't be shocked to find that someone abused the unlocked property.
The time for leaving things unsecured for principle's sake is behind us, I think.
UCE act A weak anti-spam act. Preempts state laws. No "ADV:" tag required. The DMA approves. Enough said.
Where does it say it preempts state laws? On the contrary, Sec 5(b)(3) says
OTHER ENFORCEMENT- Nothing in this Act shall be construed to prevent or limit, in any way, a provider of Internet access service from enforcing, pursuant to any remedy available under any other provision of Federal, State, or local criminal or civil law, a policy regarding unsolicited commercial electronic mail messages.
That seems to explicitly allow existing state laws in addition to this one.
As for the "ADV:" tag, it was originally proposed in the infamous Murk bill that they use "advertisement:" in the subject. Notice that, even in adopting a bill that never left Congress as their guidelines, couldn't follow that properly. "ADV", "ADVERT", "AD", and all sorts of variations popped up. The HR.3113 does call for conspicuous and clear identification that the message is UCE, so I suspect the "industry" (ha!) will settle on some set of identifiers that will end up being filterable.
As far as the DMA goes, notice that they are really against the part of HR.3113 that allows ISPs to post enforcable "no-UCE" signs on their web pages. They hate that, and it appears that one might be able to convince a judge that a personal domain that provides services to other users as an ISP to use that enforcement clause.
I would have preferred the Smith bill, but this one is better than Murk.
I guess I'm weird but, I really do enjoy getting those Harris polls... I don't consider them spam. They aren't trying to sell you anything, and unlike those annoying people in the mall trying to get you to take a poll, you can do it at your own leisure. While ultimately, yes, they are making money, but in the US, we are a capitalist society, so we HAVE to make money to survive.
Some people enjoy being physically beaten, too. Does that mean you wouldn't mind it, just because someone else doesn't mind?
If you don't mind getting their emails, fine. But don't presume to put down those that don't want them and didn't ask for them.
The assumption behind the DUL appears to be that everyone runs Windows (or at least uses software which uses the same hack for sending email).
Self evidently the "inventor" never took the time to actually read the standards.
Apparently you don't understand the principle behind the DUL. You use it if you want to enforce a rule where all incoming mail must be sent through a non-dynamic address. The only people this would affect would be ones attempting to deliver mail directly from their dynamic IP address directly to the recipient's MX.
One hand is trying to get rid of relays, another hand is insisting that they be used...
Open relays not "relays". SMTP servers that will happily relay third-party mail, often obscuring the true source in the process. Surely you can comprehend the difference between an open relay and using your ISPs outbound email server.
On the other hand, it seems to me that MAPS went overboard in claiming that the failure to use double opt-in creates the status of spam that should be blocked. Who uses double opt-in?
"Double opt-in" is marketing double-speak for "confirmed opt-in". You know, where you request to be added to their list and they send a confirmation note to which you MUST respond, or your request is ignored. All that does is authenticate that the owner of the address in question is the one asking to be added, not some pesky script kiddie trying to mailbomb you by proxy.
You know, the kind of list management procedures that virtually every well-run list uses anymore? Who uses it, indeed.
Apparently, marketing types seem to think that's a big annoyance. I'm sure they'd rather be able to scrape Usenet and the Web for addresses and call it "opt-in", after all you didn't try to hide your address.
The whole scheme sounds unworkable. How do you assign precedence to those seeking a domain name under these rules?
This vaguely worries me. I run pillars.net on my home computer mainly as a permanent place to store my resume. Last week I met somebody whose last name is "Pillars". According to these rules, anybody in that family could petition ICANN for my domain name and probably get it with no recourse on my part.
You have a good point, but you didn't take it far enough. What if, in your example, a few dozen people with the last name of "Pillars", along with a few business owners with "Pillars" in the name and some guy that makes pillars, all tried to acquire the domain name via the WIPO's rules? How would they possibly determine who should be entitled to it?
Using trademarks to determine eminent domain (heh) over domain names is flawed. If the USPTO only issued a particular trademark for all businesses, not just a particular type of business, there would be chaos. (Probably much like the current chaos in domain naming, eh?) Why some feel it would be a good idea is beyond me.
I say we force everyone to get geographically-specific domain names, except companies that can demonstrate a global presence. For a company only located in Los Angeles, they get an LA-based name. For a USA national company, they get a something.com.us name. That ought to even things out a bit.
Confirmed. The few times I used it, I saw lots of these.
I got daring and looked at the VBScript source on one of these. It traversed your shared directories and replaced all your files with copies of itself. Some Gnutella clients apparently have the ability to ignore responses from certain nodes, so ignoring infected users shouldn't be too difficult, if you pay attention to what you're doing
I don't expect the unwashed masses to be able to figure that out, though. Look at how well VBS.Loveletter spread.
Slashdot Mirror
...that would Poetic Justice!
IANAL, but I'd probably use a lawyer up front, if only to Cease and Desist the fellow. I'd be afraid, doing it myself, that I'd say or do something wrong that would bite me later if I had to resort to a lawsuit.
People generally hate (lawyers|the DMCA), but (they are|it is) a tool you might have to use to fight for your rights.
...especially from non-Lawyers, You Get What You Pay For.
if you want to catch terrorists, there are two ways: [...] This is like a self fullfilling prophecy. By declaring people to be terrorists you can make them to be.
s/terrorist/communist/
This sounds familiar for some reason.
There's a lot you don't know about the problem, so engineering such a simple question is virtually impossible.
In all honesty, moving Mt. Fuji sounds like a metaphor for large, ill-considered projects that many companies like to undertake to the detriment of their investors.
I would seriously hope that a response in the form of a question, "Why do we want to move Mt. Fuji?", would be accepted as wise, in favor of some blind estimate of how much work it would require.
I've found this true to a certain extent where I work. I'm mainly a C++ developer, but in the past have used PHP, Perl, Tcl, and various shell scripting languages. My current company writes server-side software for mid-sized businesses.
A good example was a couple of months ago, when we needed to process a not-quite-XML file into a well-formed XML document. I suggested a Perl script with a very simple regex that would solve the problem. The Powers That Be decided it would be better to have a different developer (who had the time) spend days building and testing a custom C++ reformatter application rather than less than an hour building and testing a Perl script.
To be fair, some are reluctant to ship scripts because not all clients might want to install the scripting interpreter, but some of this is from FUD about scripting being some kind of back-door into the system.
I'm pretty sure that doesn't cut the legal mustard (at least in the U.S.). If my skim of the JunkBusters [junkbusters.com] site picked up the right info, once you tell them to put you on their do-not-call list they can't call you again for ten years or you can quite easily file some legal papers and get $500 per infringement out of the bastards.
From 64 CFR 64.1200:
If you just interrupt the telemarketer with "Take me off your list", it'll take a week of calls... MAYBE two, and it'll ALL STOP.
I haven't gotten a telemarketing call in years.
Note that, if you want to take the telemarketers to court for violating your requests, you need to ask for the right thing.
47 CFR 64.1200 requires telemarketers to honor "do not call" requests, but says nothing about requests to "remove [you] from [their] list".
IANAL, but if you issue a "do not call" request, and they violate it more than once, you have private right-of-action in court for at least $500 per violation. This is not available if you continue to demand that they remove you from their phone list.
We've had a couple of single-time violations on telemarketers we've asked Do Not Call, but so far none of them have managed to do it twice.
Yeah, that thing screams false advertising. It sends no frequency over the telephone to delete your call. All it is is a recording that says the phone is disconnected.
It doesn't do that on the version I own. That emits what sounds to the human ear as a single beep, which is apparently the three DTMF tones with very short duration.
The potential for false advertising is that this "tells" the dialer on the other end to remove the number. All it does is pretend to be a dead line, and a sane autodialer would remove such numbers from their queue.
The Telezapper worked great for us, but only for large, nationwide telemarketers. Small local shops that probably use a cheaper per-telemarketer autodialer (instead of a pooled dialer) zoom right past the tone.
I, too, live in Minnesota and have similar results with MN's new Do Not Call list.
We had purchased the Telezapper, which got rid of most of our nationwide telemarketing calls, but not most of the in-state ones for whatever reason. Since 1/1/2003, we have been getting increasing numbers of telemarketing calls, and it seems to us that some telemarketers must be using the list to boost their call volumes. So long as they use the available loopholes, especially the one where they technically don't intend to make a sale over the phone, they seem to be able to legally add those numbers to their phone queues.
Pushed advertising just doesn't work, especially with a medium used for personal and even urgent communication.
So how many times have you been struck by lightning, anyway?
Yeah, but as so many have already pointed out, they lose even more money on every xbox they don't sell.
Yes, but that kind of loss is limited to their already-manufactured inventory. If buying Xboxen for Linux use becomes popular, there's the potential for the cumulative sum of losses per sale to exceed what they might have lost in unsold units.
Are their no legaleze terms on the Xbox units that prevent this kind of creative misuse? With the lengths to which they went to secure the Xbox from tampering, and with previous industry experience with unexpected Linux-ized hardware, they would seem (IMHO) to be foolish to not have expected this to happen.
Actually, it IS going to be a landing, of a sort:
I rather expect this implies it won't be manned, either.
"National park"? Which nation?
Besides, we won't see if it they constrain their mining to the far side of the moon.
Just think...
Forced unsolicited advertising that you can't avoid, because it's being pumped directly into your brain.
We haven't even figured out how to lock down individual computers and LANs from unauthorized access in most cases yet. How can we protect humans hard-wired to computers?
We just do not matter that much.
Nonsense. Clearly we can save the Earth and move its orbit by having everyone on varying sides of the globe jump up and down on a timed schedule.
An alarmist might think that this would produce large amounts of oxygen from large amounts of carbon dioxide. If these buggers ran amok and produced far too much oxygen, we'd suffer from a different type of Global Warming...
Maybe it's too radical a notion, but we seem to already have life forms on the planet that get rid of carbon dioxide. Plants. Maybe this fellow hasn't heard of them, though.
I find it difficult to believe that no one has informed him of these in the past. Therefore, one has to conclude either that he is (a) stubbornly sticking to open relays due to principles or nostalgia or (b) unable to figure out how to implement these methods.
I'm not sure which is the case, but either way he'll claim (a).
Even though you many not want your car stolen if you leave it unlocked, and even though strangers can't legally enter your home if you leave it unlocked, anyone who deliberately avoids locking them, just to make a statement, shouldn't be shocked to find that someone abused the unlocked property.
The time for leaving things unsecured for principle's sake is behind us, I think.
A weak anti-spam act. Preempts state laws. No "ADV:" tag required. The DMA approves. Enough said.
Where does it say it preempts state laws? On the contrary, Sec 5(b)(3) says
That seems to explicitly allow existing state laws in addition to this one.
As for the "ADV:" tag, it was originally proposed in the infamous Murk bill that they use "advertisement:" in the subject. Notice that, even in adopting a bill that never left Congress as their guidelines, couldn't follow that properly. "ADV", "ADVERT", "AD", and all sorts of variations popped up. The HR.3113 does call for conspicuous and clear identification that the message is UCE, so I suspect the "industry" (ha!) will settle on some set of identifiers that will end up being filterable.
As far as the DMA goes, notice that they are really against the part of HR.3113 that allows ISPs to post enforcable "no-UCE" signs on their web pages. They hate that, and it appears that one might be able to convince a judge that a personal domain that provides services to other users as an ISP to use that enforcement clause.
I would have preferred the Smith bill, but this one is better than Murk.
I guess I'm weird but, I really do enjoy getting those Harris polls... I don't consider them spam. They aren't trying to sell you anything, and unlike those annoying people in the mall trying to get you to take a poll, you can do it at your own leisure. While ultimately, yes, they are making money, but in the US, we are a capitalist society, so we HAVE to make money to survive.
Some people enjoy being physically beaten, too. Does that mean you wouldn't mind it, just because someone else doesn't mind?
If you don't mind getting their emails, fine. But don't presume to put down those that don't want them and didn't ask for them.
The assumption behind the DUL appears to be that everyone runs Windows (or at least uses software which uses the same hack for sending email). Self evidently the "inventor" never took the time to actually read the standards.
Apparently you don't understand the principle behind the DUL. You use it if you want to enforce a rule where all incoming mail must be sent through a non-dynamic address. The only people this would affect would be ones attempting to deliver mail directly from their dynamic IP address directly to the recipient's MX.
One hand is trying to get rid of relays, another hand is insisting that they be used...
Open relays not "relays". SMTP servers that will happily relay third-party mail, often obscuring the true source in the process. Surely you can comprehend the difference between an open relay and using your ISPs outbound email server.
"Double opt-in" is marketing double-speak for "confirmed opt-in". You know, where you request to be added to their list and they send a confirmation note to which you MUST respond, or your request is ignored. All that does is authenticate that the owner of the address in question is the one asking to be added, not some pesky script kiddie trying to mailbomb you by proxy.
You know, the kind of list management procedures that virtually every well-run list uses anymore? Who uses it, indeed.
Apparently, marketing types seem to think that's a big annoyance. I'm sure they'd rather be able to scrape Usenet and the Web for addresses and call it "opt-in", after all you didn't try to hide your address.
The whole scheme sounds unworkable. How do you assign precedence to those seeking a domain name under these rules?
You have a good point, but you didn't take it far enough. What if, in your example, a few dozen people with the last name of "Pillars", along with a few business owners with "Pillars" in the name and some guy that makes pillars, all tried to acquire the domain name via the WIPO's rules? How would they possibly determine who should be entitled to it?
Using trademarks to determine eminent domain (heh) over domain names is flawed. If the USPTO only issued a particular trademark for all businesses, not just a particular type of business, there would be chaos. (Probably much like the current chaos in domain naming, eh?) Why some feel it would be a good idea is beyond me.
I say we force everyone to get geographically-specific domain names, except companies that can demonstrate a global presence. For a company only located in Los Angeles, they get an LA-based name. For a USA national company, they get a something.com.us name. That ought to even things out a bit.
Confirmed. The few times I used it, I saw lots of these.
I got daring and looked at the VBScript source on one of these. It traversed your shared directories and replaced all your files with copies of itself. Some Gnutella clients apparently have the ability to ignore responses from certain nodes, so ignoring infected users shouldn't be too difficult, if you pay attention to what you're doing
I don't expect the unwashed masses to be able to figure that out, though. Look at how well VBS.Loveletter spread.