Apparently I do given how many times I've been modded up in this thread.
I get a lot of [real paper] ads and leaflets in my mailbox.
And unlike spam, you don't bear most of the cost for delivery.
The only legal (or otherwise accepted policy) here NOT to receive those ads is to put a sticker or whatever directly on the mailbox, so that the person attempting to deliver the ads will notice it and understand the message just when attempting to toss in the papers.
You obviously don't live in the U.S. In the U.S., it is illegal for anyone other than a postal carrier to put anything into a mailbox.
I think you mistake your mailbox for your driveway. Completely different concept, different laws.
No, I do not. The post to which I was responding claimed that connecting your mail server to a public network was a defacto invitation for the public to use it. I countered that a driveway is also connected to a public network (of streets) and there's no implied invitation for the world to use it. As to the laws, mail servers are protected by trespass to chattels laws and driveways are protected by property trespassing laws.
Nobody wouldn't expect putting a billboard next to my mailbox boasting all kinds of announcements of how I feel about things, to work. Also, if my name was Bill Noadsplease and I was living on Noadstreet, I wouldn't expect the ad flood stop. That's just ridiculous.
You remind me of the children who close their eyes and swing their fists saying 'if I can't see you, it's not my fault if I hit you'. Web servers are where notices about privacy policies, e-mail policies, contact information, etc. is stored.
Are you a spammer? You sure sound like one. You don't want notices posted on web pages to be binding. You don't want notices sent out by mail servers to be binding. You don't want a clear and obvious sign like a domain name of anti-spam.org to be binding on the spammers. Just where, if anywhere, should such notices be placed?
Because there are easy, check-box method white-lists which let you choose whether to leave your mail system open to everyone or whether to lock it down.
White-lists are not a viable means for securing a mail server. Normal people don't know in advance who might e-mail them in reference to their resume, an ad that they placed, a business card that they handed out, etc. They also don't have a way of knowing that ex-colleagues, bosses, clients, or friends have changed ISPs or e-mail addresses. An e-mail server that uses whitelists is useless while WiFi that uses encryption is not. Totally different animals.
You can choose to secure your web server by rejecting connections that aren't on a whitelist of IP addresses. Does this mean that not using an IP address whitelist on your web server is an invitation to those who would DDoS your web server?
There is no checkbox on a wireless server which lets you choose to reject all wardrivers and hackers whilst accepting connections from friends, colleagues, clients etc. to whom you have given your wireless address.
Sure there is. Encrypt it, don't broadcast the SSID, and give the encryption key and SSID to your friends, colleagues, clients, etc.: "If you're in the area, my WiFi is open to you. It's WPA key in ASCII is 'H0t rock5' and the SSID is '3vector#7'" It's just like giving out an e-mail address.
To use the wireless connection, people with wireless connections don't willingly accept connections from those wishing to wardrive. They may not be able to detect and block them with 100% accuracy, but it doesn't mean that they choose to let them connect.
Yes, they do willingly accept them. With WPA, restriction by MAC address, SSID broadcast disable, and other easy methods, they can reject unknown connections. If you want your friends only to use your WiFi, you can give them the passphrase and SSID. That's like giving them your e-mail address.
It seems that people here choose their reasoning based on their preferences: Slashdotters like hacking wireless networks, but don't like spam. Whatever happened to principles?
If you put an open box of donuts on a conference room table at work, then you don't have a right to complain when people eat them -- even if some of the people are ones who you don't like. That's what an open WiFi connection is like. Put those same donuts in a bag in your desk drawer, then you have very good reason to complain if someone rifles through your desk to get them. That's what hacking a secured WiFi connection is like.
But a mail server is more like an inbox on your desk. The fact that nothing can physically prevent someone from dumping an ashtray into your inbox doesn't mean that you welcome it. That's what spam is like. It's taking advantage of the fact that there's no way to completely guard the input to a mail server while still having it be useful.
You can tell a drone bot that as many times as you like. It's not going to care.
And that's what makes the spamming a willful crime. The spammer chooses to have his spam-blasting software ignore message refusals. And every day I see multiple attempts to deliver spam to addresses in my domain which are not now, and, in many cases, never have been, live.
Ummm. You get clubbed. I have yet to find spam with weapons that will cause harm to a person. Someone physically assulting you is a crime. Comparing this to spam is silly.
That one causes physical harm and the other causes economic harm (and mental anguish), does not change the fact that both are crimes. I don't know what it is about Slashdotters that makes them think that an analogy between two crimes means is equivalent to saying that the two crimes are equally "bad." When someone says "it's no use crying over spilled milk", it doesn't mean that spilling milk is literally as bad as whatever is upsetting you. Yeesh!
You are getting email - the content of that email doesn't make it any different. As for filter shortcomings, maybe you should change your filters if it's not working for you.
The content is the entire point! It's the point with spam. It's the point with phishing. And the point with personal e-mail. The protocol is just a means of delivering the message.
As to content filters, I don't use them. They are for "spam ostriches" -- the people who hide spam from themselves and then pretend it doesn't exist because they didn't see it. If someone it trying to steal my bandwidth and storage, I want to know about it. I don't want my e-mail client or server automatically deleting the messages after the bandwidth was already stolen.
Yes, you can lock down a WiFi access point, and you can also lock down a mail server. Lack of knowledge in either case is a problem here, not the lack of option.
I own the domain anti-spam.org. I consult with a company that produces mail server software and with another company that makes anti-spam appliances and software. I reject over 99% of the spam that is sent to my domain. I assure you that I know more than you do about anti-spam measures which can be employed on mail servers.
Oh, but the Slashbots reply "if you leave a wireless connection unsecured you're inviting people to use it".
Right. Because there are easy, check-box methods which let you choose whether to leave his WiFi connection open for all to use or to lock it down. It's a simple choice when you set it up. There is no checkbox on a mail server which lets you choose to reject all spam while accepting e-mail from friends, colleagues, clients, etc. to whom you have given your e-mail address.
Yes, but if you have an e-mail client with no white-list or spam-filter you're inviting unsolicited e-mail.
I have "spam filters" (actually, server-side DNS-based blacklists). I check for a valid PTR. I check for valid sender domain. I check the SPF records. I have many spam filters as well as public notices that I don't accept spam at my domain.That a spammer can occasionally sneak by the filters does not mean that the spam is welcome.
White-lists? Now you're just being foolish. Normal people can identify every e-mail address, domain, or IP address from which they will ever want to receive mail ahead of time. If you circulate your resume, you don't know the e-mail address of the person(s) who might contact you. If you put your e-mail address on your business card, you won't know the e-mail address of every person you hand it to -- and if you ask them so that they can be put on your white-list, you'll be viewed as a loony. And what happens if they change e-mail addresses?
I wonder how the slashbots will get out of that one... probably by modding me down to hide their embarassment and to maintain the RDF.
Don't pat yourself on the back. Your analogy was not particularly clever or relevent.
And I'll side with the other poster's opionion on this one.
Petty crimes are often unpunished. Would you rather people go to jail for littering? Spam is a side effect of having email.
Sending spam to millions of people is not a "petty" crime. It's the theft of huge amounts of bandwidth and disk space. It costs ISPs and users large amounts of time and money. If the average spam victim spends five seconds per spam, then lock the spammer up for 5 seconds per spam that he sent.
You seem to think that stealing small amounts from millions of people is somehow "petty" and a lesser crime than stealing a large amount from one or two people. It's not.
The capacity is still there. Same capacity. It's not like they have 'stolen' 5Gb of my drive and the 120Gb drive suddenly becoems a 115Gb drive.
Absurd. You have 5GB less storage space available. If you have 120GB of data to store on that drive, it won't fit now.
Does this mean I should sue people for putting papers in my mailbox?
No. You should report them to the U.S. Postal Service Inspection Service. It is illegal for anyone other than a mail carrier to put paper in your mailbox. Those doing it can be fined and/or jailed.
You seriously don't understand the term "public" do you?
Obviously, I understand it a lot better than you do. My mail server is not a "publicly provided service." Ever heard of "trespass to chattels"?
You are connected to a public network
Your driveway is connected to a public network of streets. Does that mean that the public has full use of your driveway?
and you are willingly accepting connections from public SMTP servers.
Some, yes. But I don't willingly accept connections from those wishing to deliver spam. I may not be able to detect and block them with 100% accuracy, but it doesn't mean that I choose to let them connect.
This is no different than a shop keeper running a "public" store in which people are indisicriminatly allowed to shop.
By your argument, the shopkeeper "willingly" let in shoplifters. That he could not tell they were shoplifters apparently should not matter because his door wasn't a magic door that could decide who should enter and who should be kept out. So, therefore, he allowed them to steal from him.
Posting something to a web site on a domain is like saying "Well, I posted my "No Trespassing signs in my bedroom, what do you mean you didn't see it"? It's a different mechanism, in a different place.
Wrong. It is an accepted means by which domains convey policy information, including information about their e-mail policy. Unlike your example, the policy for my domain is prominently posted for all, not hidden away out of public view. Your argument is like saying that a "no soliciting" sign didn't count because it was on a shop window rather than the door.
But all that is really beside the point. You willingly let anyone connect to your server.
No, I willingly let connect only those servers which are attempting to deliver something other than spam. The others connect to my server against my will. If I DDoS your web server, are you saying that it's okay because it "willingly" accepted the connections?
If you invite the world to your doorstep, but don't want some people there, you best have a way to stop them.
You mistake a sidewalk as an open invitation to the world. More reasonable people do not.
Im going to use an arguement here that often is used on slashdot in defence of abusing open wifi points. The email server is accepting the connection, its accepting the email, its accepting the contents, at no point does it say 'no', so how can it be called theft?
I've seen 8 or more attempts in rapid-fire succession from different IP addresses all trying to deliver the same piece of spam after mail server refused the mail each time with a message stating that spam/UCE is not permitted at my domain. How many times must it say 'no'? How many days in a row must it tell any given spammer that we don't want their spam?
If someone knocks on your door dressed as a furnace repair man, how can it be called assault and battery if they come in and club you? That's the problem with spam. It pretends to be something that it is not in order to sneak its way into your mail server. It misidentifies the sender. It uses misspellings in the subject and body to evade filters meant to stop it. It often has misleading subject lines to make it appear to be a message from a friend or a company that you do business with.
Thats analogous to a wifi point accepting the connection and issuing you an IP address on request, which is the arguement people use on this forum in defence of using open wifi points.
I have used that very argument. But there's the key difference: There are simple, documented means to reject unwanted WiFi connections. There is no check-box on mail servers saying "do not accept spam." With WiFi, many people and organizations choose to make it freely available, so it's not unreasonable to assume that an open WiFi connection is intended for public use. Given the almost universal hatred of spam, it would be absurd to believe that it was welcome at any mail server that accepted it.
It's not a non-sequitor at all. Your post was about the costs associated with receiving spam, and I was pointing out that jailing spammers would increase that overall cost.
No, showing that they were taking something which had a cost was proving that it was theft. And we all accept that people should be jailed for theft -- even though it does not recoup any costs. As I said before, the purpose of jail is to punish, rehabilitate, and dissuade others from committing the crime -- not to be a profit-making venture.
If you can't come up with a better line of reasoning than - there are costs, therefore jail - then I can't see approaching this problem from anything other than a case of trying to minimize costs.
That you are incapable of understanding that jailing people for activity X usually greatly reduces activity X, and its associated cost to society, is not a reflection on me.
There are huge differences between this and the convenience store example. The person who robs a convenience store presumably did it with the threat of violence, and therefore he is a threat to society (thus, a criminal offense). On the other hand, spammers just waste other people's time and money, and thus handling this in the civil courts makes more sense.
If you feel the need to focus on the violence aspect of robbery, then I retract that analogy.
Should burglers be jailed? Should pickpockets be jailed? Should vandals be jailed? Should art thieves be jailed? Should con artists be jailed? Should identity thieves be jailed?
All of those criminals just effect a monetary and time cost on the victims -- like spammers do.
They're using a publicly provided service with no effective barriers or restrictions on it's use.
No, the "public" isn't providing my mail server. The public didn't pay for the server, the software, the bandwidth, or the storage. I have effective (though not 100% effective) barriers to spam and I have posted the restrictions against sending spam to my domain. I also have less than 100% effective defense against other forms of trespass, but it doesn't mean that I should just put up with trespassers.
There are no posted signs that say "keep off the grass" or realistic ways to prevent anyone from doing so.
My domain is anti-spam.org. If that's not enough, my home page includes the following notice:
anti-spam.org specifically prohibits the transmission of spam (unsolicited bulk e-mail) to our network and considers spam e-mail a form of computer trespass. Spam constitutes a theft of our limited bandwidth and storage and interferes with our use of our Internet connection.
Well if we're talking costs, we should be comparing the cost of spam to the cost of keeping someone in jail...
That's like saying that we should be comparing the cost of child neglect to the cost of keeping someone in jail. It's a non-sequitor. The purpose of jail is to punish, rehabilitate, and dissuade others from committing the crime -- not to be a profit-making venture.
I don't have the numbers, but I can guarantee sending someone to jail at least doesn't get you back any money.
If someone robs a convenience store, putting them in jail doesn't get back any of the stolen money. Would you recommend that we stop jailing people who rob convenience stores?
CNN has up entitled an article Drawing Minorities Into Gaming, which discusses the lack of minority heroes in games as well as the lack of minorities in game development.
Most of the people playing Tomb Raider in the role of buxom, tanned Lara Croft were probably nerdy white guys in their basements. I doubt that the creation of video game heroine Lara Croft resulted in lots of hot looking, large-breasted women suddenly becoming video game fanatics.
And did Super Mario Brothers really draw a lot of Italians into video gaming?
No, send them to jail for stealing bandwidth and storage. Send the to jail for harassing people by repeatedly sending the same f***ing ads for Viagra, Cialis, penis enlargement, debt consolidation, etc. Send them to jail for interfering with peoples' businesses. Send them to jail for sending ads for penis enlargement to seven year old girls. And send them to jail for a long time.
I don't think that being a spammer should get you locked up
Why not? Why should spammers be able to steal and not face jail time? What is the cost for the stolen bandwidth? What is the cost of the stolen storage? What are the administrative costs spent dealing with the theft of bandwidth and storage by spammers?
If an ISP has to buy five more mail servers, an OC3 line, and add four more drives to his RAID system to store the spam, why shouldn't those who caused the ISP to bear that cost face jail time?
Every time an employee receives spam, it takes them some period of time to recognize it as spam and delete it -- usually more if it's forwarded to a Blackberry or other mobile device. Why should employers have to bear these costs for disruptive spam and have the spammer not face jail time?
Are we just trying to keep jails empty so that the radical right can have cells to lock up college kids caught with pot at rock concerts? Where the hell are our priorities?
According to the article, there are some unintended effects to the West's ban on DDT.
The west has only banned DDT for agricultural use, not fighting disease.
Some international research agencies will simply not fund any studies related to DDT and malaria control. Who wants to be on the hot seat for spraying cancer?
And yet I gave multiple examples of funding to use DDT -- where it is still effective.
While insecticide-treated bed nets and house spraying is effective, its apparently cheaper to use DDT (the article uses a $1.70 per person per year figure).
And it is less effective. DDT usage has dropped worldwide due to mosquitos developing an immunity to it.
From a 2004 scientific research article entitled "Insecticide susceptibility status of malaria vectors in some hyperendemic tribal districts of Orissa" by S. K. Sharma, A. K. Upadhyay, M. A. Haque, O. P. Singh, T. Adak2, and S. K. Subbarao:
VECTOR control programmes in India rely mostly on indoor residual spraying by DDT. The spectacular success achieved in malaria control between 1958 and 1965 was mainly attributed to DDT. However, this achievement was short-lived and soon after malaria resurgence took place. One of the technical reasons for malaria resurgence was development of DDT resistance in primary malaria vector, Anopheles culicifacies, which is responsible for the transmission of 60-70% of new cases of malaria in India
Again, DDT is ineffective in much of the world as DDT-resistant mosquitos are now the norm.
Liberals consider DDT the poster child of runaway technologists ("we can control nature")
I am a liberal and a technologist -- and that doesn't sum up my beliefs about DDT at all. I believe that it poses significant risks to humans when it enters the food chain and that it is harmful to many forms of wildlife. That it used to be an effective means of killing mosquitos is good, but moquitos in many third-world countries have evolved a resistance to it, making malathion and other pesticides the preferable mosquito control options.
What's missing in the article are any questions to the people actually suffering from malaria. The questions were too focused on the hospital manager or the international aid organizer. I wish the journalist would have asked folks suffering from malaria how they would have chose in this Faustian bargain: higher malaria deaths (which kills mostly children under 5) or increased chances of cancer later in life?
Why do you insist on false dichotomies like that?
1. DDT is ineffective in many malaria-ravaged regions due to mosquito resistance. 2. Other pesticides are much more effective in those areas while not having the cancer risk or causing the environmental damage of DDT. 3. There is funding by aid groups for DDT spraying in areas it is still effective. 4. The EPA ban in the U.S. exempted DDT use for disease control. 5. The EPA ban permitted the export of DDT. 6. The EPA ban only prohibited DDT usage for crop spraying.
P.S. Who cares how old the victims are? I'm tired of the "think of the children" cry that comes from the right on just about every issue. The life of someone's mother, father, brother, or sister is no less precious than the life of an infant.
Yeah, let's kill millions of people every year, mostly children, by banning mostly harmless DDT!
What utter stupidity! The EPA's ban on DDT has caused ZERO deaths. By 1972 malaria had been eradicated from the US, so there was no need to spray with DDT (or any insecticide) for malaria control. When there have been some small outbreaks since 1972, they have been eradicated by other, more effective, insecticides. The radical right seems to think that DDT is the only insecticide in existence -- and that the EPA regulations are binding on every country in the world.
There is no ban on using DDT to fight malaria and there never has been. DDT is banned for agricultural use (and rightly so because of environmental damage) but can still be used for disease prevention. The radical right pretends that there is a ban so they can blame malaria deaths on environmentalists.
According to the EPA's December 31, 1972 press release on the DDT ban:
"An end to the continued domestic usage of the pesticide was decreed on June 14, 1972, when William D. Ruckelshaus, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, issued an order finally cancelling nearly all remaining Federal registrations of DDT products. Public health, quarantine, and a few minor crop uses were excepted, as well as export of the material."
So it was still legal to use it for public health, quarantine, and to export it.
"The effective date of the EPA June cancellation action was delayed until the end of this year to permit an orderly transition to substitute pesticides"
See that? "Substitute pesticides." Didn't know they had those, did you?
"During the past 30 years, approximately 675,000 tons have been applied domestically. The peak year for use in the United States was 1959 when nearly 80 million pounds were applied. From that high point, usage declined steadily to about 13 million pounds in 1971, most of it applied to cotton.
The decline was attributed to a number of factors including increased insect resistance, development of more effective alternative pesticides, growing public and user concern over adverse environmental side effects..."
Again, insects had become increasingly resistand and more effective alternatives already existed.
The World Health Organization's plan for malaria prevention in Sri Lanka after the tsunami stated:
"Endemic sporadic malaria close to the affected areas transmitted by An.culicifacies, which has been considered DDT-resistant for many years, but is still sensitive to organophosphates, such as malathion, and pyrethroids."
The mosquitoes in Sri Lanka, as in many other parts of the world, have evolved resistance to DDT. It doesn't work any more. In fact, that is the reason why they stopped using DDT in Sri Lanka. It wasn't because of any ban. It was because it became ineffective. If the radical right wasn't so busy trying to ban the teaching of evolution, they might have less trouble grasping the concept that mosquitoes evolve resistance to DDT. Fortunately, the World Health Organization does not consist of flat-Earth conservatives, so they sent malathion to Sri Lanka -- which can actually kill the mosquitoes there.
Before you waste all of our time with the much-repeated claim by the right that aid organizations won't fund DDT spraying to control malaria, I'll shoot that claim down, too:
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria finances some DDT spraying in Somalia. USAID pays for some spraying of DDT to prevent malaria in developing countries.
According to a news story from the July 18, 2005 issue of The Monitor (Uganda), Dr Herbert Wilson Lwanga, the Executive Director of the Community Welfare Services, said his agency had received funding for DDT spraying programs from the Global Fund.
Until you can show me an example of where a non-government entity kills millions every year by polluting, I'd say the radical enviromentalists have quite the
Logic be DAMNED! It's all about the *cause* that matters with envirowacos.
I am so tired of stupid, bigoted, right wingers and their moronic terms, like "envirowacos" and "feminazis," for every group that they hate.
Don't blame all environmentalists for the fact that a handful of bureacrats at the EPA and NASA used poor judgment.
Yeah, I know. Cars should still pollute as much as they did in the 1950s. Aerosols should have ozone-depleting CFCs. Factories should be able to dump toxic waste into canals (Google "Love Canal") without government interference. Farmers should be free to put DDT onto crops that we eat. Chemical companies should be able to dump dioxins into the waters where we get our fish. Paint and gasoline should still contain lead. PCBs should still be dumped into out water supply and be dispersed through the air. Children should still go to school buildings with asbestos insulation. Those damned "envirowacos" have ruined everything, haven't they?
Sorry, but this article wasn't "News for Nerds." It was fluff for technophobes.
Touting Pictbridge, card readers, and little tiny color screens, because "you need not bother booting up your PC every time you want to take a print out"?! That's great for granny who feels threatened by her PC, but for us "nerds", the thought of printing a picture without any processing (denoising, unsharp masking, exposure correction, etc.) is pretty heinous. Besides, most of us have our PCs on all of the time anyway.
The rest of the article was just as intellectually hollow:
Ink cost is a concern. No kidding?
Longer warranties are better than shorter ones and on-site service is better than having to ship the printer out for service. That's news.
Bigger input and output trays are more convenient. More insight from the tech wizards at CoolTechZone...
"Duplex printing enables you to print on both sides of a page." You don't say?
I sure am glad that I have that kind of insightful commentary to guide me -- should I ever want to buy a slow printer that costs more per page than my laser printer and can't do photo-quality printing of color images.
Tinker v. Des Moines: "The freedom of expression does not end at the schoolhouse router."
Unrelated.
In the Tinker case, the school did not incur a monetary cost -- the students were simply wearing armbands in protest of the Vietnam War. Had the students demanded that the school pay part of the cost of the armbands, the decision would have been a far different one.
And that's what we have here. The receipt, storage, and distribution of spam on campus is not without cost. If the school chooses (rightly) not to bear that cost, they have a right to block the spam.
The thing i ask is why us poeple are so arrogant to think it's okay that they interact with foreign poeple and expect them to speak their language instead of the opposite. I think suse should leave english translation as a supplemental package created by some external us-guy (or uk), like all those us-software does for german language files.
Had you won WWII, I'm sure that's how things would be. Of course the German people seemed more interested in conquering other nations than interacting with them, so German would probably be the only language permitted in software.
The router is only your agent if you have given the router permission to act as your agent. This would have to be explicit somewhere.
If I knock at your door and someone invites me in, then I'm not trespassing.
If I knock at your router and it invites me into your network, then I'm not trespassing.
You control the router. You're the one who decides whether it should give me out IP addresses, whether it should use encryption, whether there is a restriction by MAC address, etc.
At the CD sampling rate of 44.1KHz, frequencies at 22KHz can be out of phase by as much as 90 degrees. at 11 Khz, that's a possible error of up to 45 degrees. That's quite a lot of phase distortion.
CDs are supposed to be brick-wall filtered above 20khz. As to the phase distortion, is it audible in a double-blind test? I don't know.
But I totally agree with your assessment of vinyl suckage, I'm just being pedantic for the hell of it.
CD suck, too. Just not in the same way, or as much, as vinyl.
I think (usual disclaimer...) you might be partially liable under some form of criminal negligence law.
Then why isn't Earthlink liable under a criminal negligence law when they let their users have open access to peer-to-peer services? The fact that I don't charge for access should not prevent me from being shielded by the same "common carrier" defense that they use.
And let's not forget that there are worse things than copyright infringement, like spamming, phishing, hate speech, etc.
You could block block every common port (21, 22, 23, 25, 80, 110, 443), leaving open others, including those used for peer-to-peer services.
Also, a good legal defense usually comes into play when you are in court (or well on the way there) and that's probably a lot less fun than it sounds;)
Slashdot Mirror
Man, you just don't get it.
Apparently I do given how many times I've been modded up in this thread.
I get a lot of [real paper] ads and leaflets in my mailbox.
And unlike spam, you don't bear most of the cost for delivery.
The only legal (or otherwise accepted policy) here NOT to receive those ads is to put a sticker or whatever directly on the mailbox, so that the person attempting to deliver the ads will notice it and understand the message just when attempting to toss in the papers.
You obviously don't live in the U.S. In the U.S., it is illegal for anyone other than a postal carrier to put anything into a mailbox.
I think you mistake your mailbox for your driveway. Completely different concept, different laws.
No, I do not. The post to which I was responding claimed that connecting your mail server to a public network was a defacto invitation for the public to use it. I countered that a driveway is also connected to a public network (of streets) and there's no implied invitation for the world to use it. As to the laws, mail servers are protected by trespass to chattels laws and driveways are protected by property trespassing laws.
Nobody wouldn't expect putting a billboard next to my mailbox boasting all kinds of announcements of how I feel about things, to work. Also, if my name was Bill Noadsplease and I was living on Noadstreet, I wouldn't expect the ad flood stop. That's just ridiculous.
You remind me of the children who close their eyes and swing their fists saying 'if I can't see you, it's not my fault if I hit you'. Web servers are where notices about privacy policies, e-mail policies, contact information, etc. is stored.
Are you a spammer? You sure sound like one. You don't want notices posted on web pages to be binding. You don't want notices sent out by mail servers to be binding. You don't want a clear and obvious sign like a domain name of anti-spam.org to be binding on the spammers. Just where, if anywhere, should such notices be placed?
Because there are easy, check-box method white-lists which let you choose whether to leave your mail system open to everyone or whether to lock it down.
White-lists are not a viable means for securing a mail server. Normal people don't know in advance who might e-mail them in reference to their resume, an ad that they placed, a business card that they handed out, etc. They also don't have a way of knowing that ex-colleagues, bosses, clients, or friends have changed ISPs or e-mail addresses. An e-mail server that uses whitelists is useless while WiFi that uses encryption is not. Totally different animals.
You can choose to secure your web server by rejecting connections that aren't on a whitelist of IP addresses. Does this mean that not using an IP address whitelist on your web server is an invitation to those who would DDoS your web server?
There is no checkbox on a wireless server which lets you choose to reject all wardrivers and hackers whilst accepting connections from friends, colleagues, clients etc. to whom you have given your wireless address.
Sure there is. Encrypt it, don't broadcast the SSID, and give the encryption key and SSID to your friends, colleagues, clients, etc.: "If you're in the area, my WiFi is open to you. It's WPA key in ASCII is 'H0t rock5' and the SSID is '3vector#7'" It's just like giving out an e-mail address.
To use the wireless connection, people with wireless connections don't willingly accept connections from those wishing to wardrive. They may not be able to detect and block them with 100% accuracy, but it doesn't mean that they choose to let them connect.
Yes, they do willingly accept them. With WPA, restriction by MAC address, SSID broadcast disable, and other easy methods, they can reject unknown connections. If you want your friends only to use your WiFi, you can give them the passphrase and SSID. That's like giving them your e-mail address.
It seems that people here choose their reasoning based on their preferences: Slashdotters like hacking wireless networks, but don't like spam. Whatever happened to principles?
If you put an open box of donuts on a conference room table at work, then you don't have a right to complain when people eat them -- even if some of the people are ones who you don't like. That's what an open WiFi connection is like. Put those same donuts in a bag in your desk drawer, then you have very good reason to complain if someone rifles through your desk to get them. That's what hacking a secured WiFi connection is like.
But a mail server is more like an inbox on your desk. The fact that nothing can physically prevent someone from dumping an ashtray into your inbox doesn't mean that you welcome it. That's what spam is like. It's taking advantage of the fact that there's no way to completely guard the input to a mail server while still having it be useful.
You can tell a drone bot that as many times as you like. It's not going to care.
And that's what makes the spamming a willful crime. The spammer chooses to have his spam-blasting software ignore message refusals. And every day I see multiple attempts to deliver spam to addresses in my domain which are not now, and, in many cases, never have been, live.
Ummm. You get clubbed. I have yet to find spam with weapons that will cause harm to a person. Someone physically assulting you is a crime. Comparing this to spam is silly.
That one causes physical harm and the other causes economic harm (and mental anguish), does not change the fact that both are crimes. I don't know what it is about Slashdotters that makes them think that an analogy between two crimes means is equivalent to saying that the two crimes are equally "bad." When someone says "it's no use crying over spilled milk", it doesn't mean that spilling milk is literally as bad as whatever is upsetting you. Yeesh!
You are getting email - the content of that email doesn't make it any different. As for filter shortcomings, maybe you should change your filters if it's not working for you.
The content is the entire point! It's the point with spam. It's the point with phishing. And the point with personal e-mail. The protocol is just a means of delivering the message.
As to content filters, I don't use them. They are for "spam ostriches" -- the people who hide spam from themselves and then pretend it doesn't exist because they didn't see it. If someone it trying to steal my bandwidth and storage, I want to know about it. I don't want my e-mail client or server automatically deleting the messages after the bandwidth was already stolen.
Yes, you can lock down a WiFi access point, and you can also lock down a mail server. Lack of knowledge in either case is a problem here, not the lack of option.
I own the domain anti-spam.org. I consult with a company that produces mail server software and with another company that makes anti-spam appliances and software. I reject over 99% of the spam that is sent to my domain. I assure you that I know more than you do about anti-spam measures which can be employed on mail servers.
Oh, but the Slashbots reply "if you leave a wireless connection unsecured you're inviting people to use it".
Right. Because there are easy, check-box methods which let you choose whether to leave his WiFi connection open for all to use or to lock it down. It's a simple choice when you set it up. There is no checkbox on a mail server which lets you choose to reject all spam while accepting e-mail from friends, colleagues, clients, etc. to whom you have given your e-mail address.
Yes, but if you have an e-mail client with no white-list or spam-filter you're inviting unsolicited e-mail.
I have "spam filters" (actually, server-side DNS-based blacklists). I check for a valid PTR. I check for valid sender domain. I check the SPF records. I have many spam filters as well as public notices that I don't accept spam at my domain.That a spammer can occasionally sneak by the filters does not mean that the spam is welcome.
White-lists? Now you're just being foolish. Normal people can identify every e-mail address, domain, or IP address from which they will ever want to receive mail ahead of time. If you circulate your resume, you don't know the e-mail address of the person(s) who might contact you. If you put your e-mail address on your business card, you won't know the e-mail address of every person you hand it to -- and if you ask them so that they can be put on your white-list, you'll be viewed as a loony. And what happens if they change e-mail addresses?
I wonder how the slashbots will get out of that one... probably by modding me down to hide their embarassment and to maintain the RDF.
Don't pat yourself on the back. Your analogy was not particularly clever or relevent.
intresting enough, why is microshaft taking the money when it was the end user who got spammed.
1. Because it went through Microsoft's servers.
2. Because Microsoft incurred the cost of the legal fees associated with the lawsuit.
Opinion is everything.
And I'll side with the other poster's opionion on this one.
Petty crimes are often unpunished. Would you rather people go to jail for littering? Spam is a side effect of having email.
Sending spam to millions of people is not a "petty" crime. It's the theft of huge amounts of bandwidth and disk space. It costs ISPs and users large amounts of time and money. If the average spam victim spends five seconds per spam, then lock the spammer up for 5 seconds per spam that he sent.
You seem to think that stealing small amounts from millions of people is somehow "petty" and a lesser crime than stealing a large amount from one or two people. It's not.
The capacity is still there. Same capacity. It's not like they have 'stolen' 5Gb of my drive and the 120Gb drive suddenly becoems a 115Gb drive.
Absurd. You have 5GB less storage space available. If you have 120GB of data to store on that drive, it won't fit now.
Does this mean I should sue people for putting papers in my mailbox?
No. You should report them to the U.S. Postal Service Inspection Service. It is illegal for anyone other than a mail carrier to put paper in your mailbox. Those doing it can be fined and/or jailed.
You seriously don't understand the term "public" do you?
Obviously, I understand it a lot better than you do. My mail server is not a "publicly provided service." Ever heard of "trespass to chattels"?
You are connected to a public network
Your driveway is connected to a public network of streets. Does that mean that the public has full use of your driveway?
and you are willingly accepting connections from public SMTP servers.
Some, yes. But I don't willingly accept connections from those wishing to deliver spam. I may not be able to detect and block them with 100% accuracy, but it doesn't mean that I choose to let them connect.
This is no different than a shop keeper running a "public" store in which people are indisicriminatly allowed to shop.
By your argument, the shopkeeper "willingly" let in shoplifters. That he could not tell they were shoplifters apparently should not matter because his door wasn't a magic door that could decide who should enter and who should be kept out. So, therefore, he allowed them to steal from him.
Posting something to a web site on a domain is like saying "Well, I posted my "No Trespassing signs in my bedroom, what do you mean you didn't see it"? It's a different mechanism, in a different place.
Wrong. It is an accepted means by which domains convey policy information, including information about their e-mail policy. Unlike your example, the policy for my domain is prominently posted for all, not hidden away out of public view. Your argument is like saying that a "no soliciting" sign didn't count because it was on a shop window rather than the door.
But all that is really beside the point. You willingly let anyone connect to your server.
No, I willingly let connect only those servers which are attempting to deliver something other than spam. The others connect to my server against my will. If I DDoS your web server, are you saying that it's okay because it "willingly" accepted the connections?
If you invite the world to your doorstep, but don't want some people there, you best have a way to stop them.
You mistake a sidewalk as an open invitation to the world. More reasonable people do not.
Im going to use an arguement here that often is used on slashdot in defence of abusing open wifi points. The email server is accepting the connection, its accepting the email, its accepting the contents, at no point does it say 'no', so how can it be called theft?
I've seen 8 or more attempts in rapid-fire succession from different IP addresses all trying to deliver the same piece of spam after mail server refused the mail each time with a message stating that spam/UCE is not permitted at my domain. How many times must it say 'no'? How many days in a row must it tell any given spammer that we don't want their spam?
If someone knocks on your door dressed as a furnace repair man, how can it be called assault and battery if they come in and club you? That's the problem with spam. It pretends to be something that it is not in order to sneak its way into your mail server. It misidentifies the sender. It uses misspellings in the subject and body to evade filters meant to stop it. It often has misleading subject lines to make it appear to be a message from a friend or a company that you do business with.
Thats analogous to a wifi point accepting the connection and issuing you an IP address on request, which is the arguement people use on this forum in defence of using open wifi points.
I have used that very argument. But there's the key difference: There are simple, documented means to reject unwanted WiFi connections. There is no check-box on mail servers saying "do not accept spam." With WiFi, many people and organizations choose to make it freely available, so it's not unreasonable to assume that an open WiFi connection is intended for public use. Given the almost universal hatred of spam, it would be absurd to believe that it was welcome at any mail server that accepted it.
It's not a non-sequitor at all. Your post was about the costs associated with receiving spam, and I was pointing out that jailing spammers would increase that overall cost.
No, showing that they were taking something which had a cost was proving that it was theft. And we all accept that people should be jailed for theft -- even though it does not recoup any costs. As I said before, the purpose of jail is to punish, rehabilitate, and dissuade others from committing the crime -- not to be a profit-making venture.
If you can't come up with a better line of reasoning than - there are costs, therefore jail - then I can't see approaching this problem from anything other than a case of trying to minimize costs.
That you are incapable of understanding that jailing people for activity X usually greatly reduces activity X, and its associated cost to society, is not a reflection on me.
There are huge differences between this and the convenience store example. The person who robs a convenience store presumably did it with the threat of violence, and therefore he is a threat to society (thus, a criminal offense). On the other hand, spammers just waste other people's time and money, and thus handling this in the civil courts makes more sense.
If you feel the need to focus on the violence aspect of robbery, then I retract that analogy.
Should burglers be jailed?
Should pickpockets be jailed?
Should vandals be jailed?
Should art thieves be jailed?
Should con artists be jailed?
Should identity thieves be jailed?
All of those criminals just effect a monetary and time cost on the victims -- like spammers do.
No, the "public" isn't providing my mail server. The public didn't pay for the server, the software, the bandwidth, or the storage. I have effective (though not 100% effective) barriers to spam and I have posted the restrictions against sending spam to my domain. I also have less than 100% effective defense against other forms of trespass, but it doesn't mean that I should just put up with trespassers.
There are no posted signs that say "keep off the grass" or realistic ways to prevent anyone from doing so.
My domain is anti-spam.org. If that's not enough, my home page includes the following notice:How much more obvious can I make it?
Well if we're talking costs, we should be comparing the cost of spam to the cost of keeping someone in jail...
That's like saying that we should be comparing the cost of child neglect to the cost of keeping someone in jail. It's a non-sequitor. The purpose of jail is to punish, rehabilitate, and dissuade others from committing the crime -- not to be a profit-making venture.
I don't have the numbers, but I can guarantee sending someone to jail at least doesn't get you back any money.
If someone robs a convenience store, putting them in jail doesn't get back any of the stolen money. Would you recommend that we stop jailing people who rob convenience stores?
CNN has up entitled an article Drawing Minorities Into Gaming, which discusses the lack of minority heroes in games as well as the lack of minorities in game development.
Most of the people playing Tomb Raider in the role of buxom, tanned Lara Croft were probably nerdy white guys in their basements. I doubt that the creation of video game heroine Lara Croft resulted in lots of hot looking, large-breasted women suddenly becoming video game fanatics.
And did Super Mario Brothers really draw a lot of Italians into video gaming?
Send people to jail for sending email? C'mon...
No, send them to jail for stealing bandwidth and storage. Send the to jail for harassing people by repeatedly sending the same f***ing ads for Viagra, Cialis, penis enlargement, debt consolidation, etc. Send them to jail for interfering with peoples' businesses. Send them to jail for sending ads for penis enlargement to seven year old girls. And send them to jail for a long time.
I don't think that being a spammer should get you locked up
Why not? Why should spammers be able to steal and not face jail time? What is the cost for the stolen bandwidth? What is the cost of the stolen storage? What are the administrative costs spent dealing with the theft of bandwidth and storage by spammers?
If an ISP has to buy five more mail servers, an OC3 line, and add four more drives to his RAID system to store the spam, why shouldn't those who caused the ISP to bear that cost face jail time?
Every time an employee receives spam, it takes them some period of time to recognize it as spam and delete it -- usually more if it's forwarded to a Blackberry or other mobile device. Why should employers have to bear these costs for disruptive spam and have the spammer not face jail time?
Are we just trying to keep jails empty so that the radical right can have cells to lock up college kids caught with pot at rock concerts? Where the hell are our priorities?
According to the article, there are some unintended effects to the West's ban on DDT.
The west has only banned DDT for agricultural use, not fighting disease.
Some international research agencies will simply not fund any studies related to DDT and malaria control. Who wants to be on the hot seat for spraying cancer?
And yet I gave multiple examples of funding to use DDT -- where it is still effective.
While insecticide-treated bed nets and house spraying is effective, its apparently cheaper to use DDT (the article uses a $1.70 per person per year figure).
And it is less effective. DDT usage has dropped worldwide due to mosquitos developing an immunity to it.
From a 2004 scientific research article entitled "Insecticide susceptibility status of malaria vectors in some hyperendemic tribal districts of Orissa" by S. K. Sharma, A. K. Upadhyay, M. A. Haque, O. P. Singh, T. Adak2, and S. K. Subbarao:
VECTOR control programmes in India rely mostly on indoor residual spraying by DDT. The spectacular success achieved in malaria control between 1958 and 1965 was mainly attributed to DDT. However, this achievement was short-lived and soon after malaria resurgence took place. One of the technical reasons for malaria resurgence was development of DDT resistance in primary malaria vector, Anopheles culicifacies, which is responsible for the transmission of 60-70% of new cases of malaria in India
Again, DDT is ineffective in much of the world as DDT-resistant mosquitos are now the norm.
Liberals consider DDT the poster child of runaway technologists ("we can control nature")
I am a liberal and a technologist -- and that doesn't sum up my beliefs about DDT at all. I believe that it poses significant risks to humans when it enters the food chain and that it is harmful to many forms of wildlife. That it used to be an effective means of killing mosquitos is good, but moquitos in many third-world countries have evolved a resistance to it, making malathion and other pesticides the preferable mosquito control options.
What's missing in the article are any questions to the people actually suffering from malaria. The questions were too focused on the hospital manager or the international aid organizer. I wish the journalist would have asked folks suffering from malaria how they would have chose in this Faustian bargain: higher malaria deaths (which kills mostly children under 5) or increased chances of cancer later in life?
Why do you insist on false dichotomies like that?
1. DDT is ineffective in many malaria-ravaged regions due to mosquito resistance.
2. Other pesticides are much more effective in those areas while not having the cancer risk or causing the environmental damage of DDT.
3. There is funding by aid groups for DDT spraying in areas it is still effective.
4. The EPA ban in the U.S. exempted DDT use for disease control.
5. The EPA ban permitted the export of DDT.
6. The EPA ban only prohibited DDT usage for crop spraying.
P.S. Who cares how old the victims are? I'm tired of the "think of the children" cry that comes from the right on just about every issue. The life of someone's mother, father, brother, or sister is no less precious than the life of an infant.
What you haven't realized is you are not in the audience that they are catering to.
The first line of my post was:
'Sorry, but this article wasn't "News for Nerds." It was fluff for technophobes.'
After reading that, I can't see how you could believe that I thought that I was the intended audience.
Yeah, let's kill millions of people every year, mostly children, by banning mostly harmless DDT!
What utter stupidity! The EPA's ban on DDT has caused ZERO deaths. By 1972 malaria had been eradicated from the US, so there was no need to spray with DDT (or any insecticide) for malaria control. When there have been some small outbreaks since 1972, they have been eradicated by other, more effective, insecticides. The radical right seems to think that DDT is the only insecticide in existence -- and that the EPA regulations are binding on every country in the world.
There is no ban on using DDT to fight malaria and there never has been. DDT is banned for agricultural use (and rightly so because of environmental damage) but can still be used for disease prevention. The radical right pretends that there is a ban so they can blame malaria deaths on environmentalists.
According to the EPA's December 31, 1972 press release on the DDT ban:
"An end to the continued domestic usage of the pesticide was decreed on June 14, 1972, when William D. Ruckelshaus, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, issued an order finally cancelling nearly all remaining Federal registrations of DDT products. Public health, quarantine, and a few minor crop uses were excepted, as well as export of the material."
So it was still legal to use it for public health, quarantine, and to export it.
"The effective date of the EPA June cancellation action was delayed until the end of this year to permit an orderly transition to substitute pesticides"
See that? "Substitute pesticides." Didn't know they had those, did you?
"During the past 30 years, approximately 675,000 tons have been applied domestically. The peak year for use in the United States was 1959 when nearly 80 million pounds were applied. From that high point, usage declined steadily to about 13 million pounds in 1971, most of it applied to cotton.
The decline was attributed to a number of factors including increased insect resistance, development of more effective alternative pesticides, growing public and user concern over adverse environmental side effects..."
Again, insects had become increasingly resistand and more effective alternatives already existed.
The World Health Organization's plan for malaria prevention in Sri Lanka after the tsunami stated:
"Endemic sporadic malaria close to the affected areas transmitted by An.culicifacies, which has been considered DDT-resistant for many years, but is still sensitive to organophosphates, such as malathion, and pyrethroids."
The mosquitoes in Sri Lanka, as in many other parts of the world, have evolved resistance to DDT. It doesn't work any more. In fact, that is the reason why they stopped using DDT in Sri Lanka. It wasn't because of any ban. It was because it became ineffective. If the radical right wasn't so busy trying to ban the teaching of evolution, they might have less trouble grasping the concept that mosquitoes evolve resistance to DDT. Fortunately, the World Health Organization does not consist of flat-Earth conservatives, so they sent malathion to Sri Lanka -- which can actually kill the mosquitoes there.
Before you waste all of our time with the much-repeated claim by the right that aid organizations won't fund DDT spraying to control malaria, I'll shoot that claim down, too:
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria finances some DDT spraying in Somalia. USAID pays for some spraying of DDT to prevent malaria in developing countries.
According to a news story from the July 18, 2005 issue of The Monitor (Uganda), Dr Herbert Wilson Lwanga, the Executive Director of the Community Welfare Services, said his agency had received funding for DDT spraying programs from the Global Fund.
Until you can show me an example of where a non-government entity kills millions every year by polluting, I'd say the radical enviromentalists have quite the
Logic be DAMNED! It's all about the *cause* that matters with envirowacos.
I am so tired of stupid, bigoted, right wingers and their moronic terms, like "envirowacos" and "feminazis," for every group that they hate.
Don't blame all environmentalists for the fact that a handful of bureacrats at the EPA and NASA used poor judgment.
Yeah, I know. Cars should still pollute as much as they did in the 1950s. Aerosols should have ozone-depleting CFCs. Factories should be able to dump toxic waste into canals (Google "Love Canal") without government interference. Farmers should be free to put DDT onto crops that we eat. Chemical companies should be able to dump dioxins into the waters where we get our fish. Paint and gasoline should still contain lead. PCBs should still be dumped into out water supply and be dispersed through the air. Children should still go to school buildings with asbestos insulation. Those damned "envirowacos" have ruined everything, haven't they?
Sorry, but this article wasn't "News for Nerds." It was fluff for technophobes.
Touting Pictbridge, card readers, and little tiny color screens, because "you need not bother booting up your PC every time you want to take a print out"?! That's great for granny who feels threatened by her PC, but for us "nerds", the thought of printing a picture without any processing (denoising, unsharp masking, exposure correction, etc.) is pretty heinous. Besides, most of us have our PCs on all of the time anyway.
The rest of the article was just as intellectually hollow:
Ink cost is a concern. No kidding?
Longer warranties are better than shorter ones and on-site service is better than having to ship the printer out for service. That's news.
Bigger input and output trays are more convenient. More insight from the tech wizards at CoolTechZone...
"Duplex printing enables you to print on both sides of a page." You don't say?
I sure am glad that I have that kind of insightful commentary to guide me -- should I ever want to buy a slow printer that costs more per page than my laser printer and can't do photo-quality printing of color images.
Tinker v. Des Moines: "The freedom of expression does not end at the schoolhouse router."
Unrelated.
In the Tinker case, the school did not incur a monetary cost -- the students were simply wearing armbands in protest of the Vietnam War. Had the students demanded that the school pay part of the cost of the armbands, the decision would have been a far different one.
And that's what we have here. The receipt, storage, and distribution of spam on campus is not without cost. If the school chooses (rightly) not to bear that cost, they have a right to block the spam.
The thing i ask is why us poeple are so arrogant to think it's okay that they interact with foreign poeple and expect them to speak their language instead of the opposite. I think suse should leave english translation as a supplemental package created by some external us-guy (or uk), like all those us-software does for german language files.
Had you won WWII, I'm sure that's how things would be. Of course the German people seemed more interested in conquering other nations than interacting with them, so German would probably be the only language permitted in software.
The router is only your agent if you have given the router permission to act as your agent. This would have to be explicit somewhere.
If I knock at your door and someone invites me in, then I'm not trespassing.
If I knock at your router and it invites me into your network, then I'm not trespassing.
You control the router. You're the one who decides whether it should give me out IP addresses, whether it should use encryption, whether there is a restriction by MAC address, etc.
At the CD sampling rate of 44.1KHz, frequencies at 22KHz can be out of phase by as much as 90 degrees. at 11 Khz, that's a possible error of up to 45 degrees. That's quite a lot of phase distortion.
CDs are supposed to be brick-wall filtered above 20khz. As to the phase distortion, is it audible in a double-blind test? I don't know.
But I totally agree with your assessment of vinyl suckage, I'm just being pedantic for the hell of it.
CD suck, too. Just not in the same way, or as much, as vinyl.
I think (usual disclaimer...) you might be partially liable under some form of criminal negligence law.
;)
Then why isn't Earthlink liable under a criminal negligence law when they let their users have open access to peer-to-peer services? The fact that I don't charge for access should not prevent me from being shielded by the same "common carrier" defense that they use.
And let's not forget that there are worse things than copyright infringement, like spamming, phishing, hate speech, etc.
You could block block every common port (21, 22, 23, 25, 80, 110, 443), leaving open others, including those used for peer-to-peer services.
Also, a good legal defense usually comes into play when you are in court (or well on the way there) and that's probably a lot less fun than it sounds
An excellent point.