Selling email lists should be illegal (except opt-in lists)
There are countless examples of companies buying lists that are supposed to be users who have opted-in to receive, only to discover that the list is nothing of the sort (the recent Sainsburys spam incident, for example). I am very sceptical that real lists of opt-ins even exist, despite the bold claims of the spam^H^H^H^H marketers.
Set evolution to flag any email that contains "unsubscribe" in the body. That just might work.
Erm, what about admin messages from distribution lists? It's quite likely that they will contain this word. Email filtering needs to be a little smarter than this (cf the nameless organisation whose response to the gone virus was to drop any mail with "hi" in the subject).
Check out the Wired article on the workshop. Preston Padden, head of government relations for Disney, is quoted as saying :
"There is no right to fair use... Fair use is a defense against infringement."
This from the company that bought off the politicians to change the law in the 90s and so prevent Mickey Mouse going out of copyright in 2004. This from the company that appropriates others' intellectual property and claims it as their own (Snow White, Aladdin, Christmas Carol, countless others). They are thieves and liars.
Note that not a single work has gone out of copyright in the US since the first world war. If the corps get their way, nothing will ever go out of copyright again. We will still have a culture, but you'll need to purchase a license to partake of it.
I prefer the term "Digital Rights Infringment" to Digital Rights Management, since the only rights being "managed" are those of the content providers. Where in this technology are the bits that protect my digital rights as a (potential) purchaser of such content? It would seem some rights are more important than others. I always believed that rights came with responsibilities, above all, the responsibility to respect the rights of others. These days, "rights" are what corporations get in return for soft-money bribes.
Old ground for/., I know, but I still think it's worth using using phrases such as "digital rights infringement technology" and "copy inhibited" rather than the corp-friendly "copy protection", especially when you discuss this issue with non-techies. The battle is half lost if we let the very language of the debate be decided by those who would take away our rights.
BMG records already had an embarassing setback with this type of scheme in the UK. Customer returns forced them into withdrawing the copy inhibited version and re-releasing a "standard" CD. They're a business, and cannot sell something which people don't want to buy. Returns cost, in real money as well as bad publicity.
It is your civic duty to protect your rights by buying and returning these CDs. The attempt to force copy inhibited products on us can be defeated simply by making digital rights infringement technologies too expensive to introduce.
I'll stand corrected if you're telling me that Gilmore *doesn't* want to run an open server. Please do go ahead and explain my deep lack of understanding.
Unfortunately, his home page isn't accessible at the moment (coincidence?), but as I recall, his version of the spat with the ISP in question boiled down to "I *founded* this ISP. I can do what I like. The rules for civilised behaviour that everyone else follows don't apply to me. I refuse to accept that the internet is different now than it was in the 80s", with a few layers of bogus arguments about free speech. I have a great deal of respect for John Gilmore, but I think he's wrong on this one.
I'm glad you ignored my post to the point where you responded, but I don't quite see how the stuff you write about hashes fits in - which part of my post is that a response to? I thought this thread was about blacklists of the MAPS and ORBS kind?
I understand that any time I receive any piece of unsolicited email it is because *I* supplied my email address to the spammer I'm sure there are hundreds of people who have their own stories to prove that the above statement is simply false. Many spam operations build lists of all potential [user]@domain.com addresses; addresses for which the spam doesn't bounce are then added to the "valid address" file (which is typically then sold on to others as being a list of "people who have indicated that they wish to receive email" about whatever they're selling). And this is the point really - this is not about "free speech" or the "rights" of spammers. It's about a bunch of shysters using deceptive business practices to try and turn a dollar, and doing it *at others' expense*.
I support the EFF (inc. with money) but I can't help suspect that John Gilmore's own personal desire to operate an open relay has significantly influenced the EFF into slamming MAPS and praising Brightmail. Has JG's machine just been added to MAPS or something?
I entirely agree that ISPs should not be filtering email without notice or consent and that "end-user" tools are the best solution, but I disagree vehemently that a spammer's right to "free speech" overrides my right to accept or deny data arriving at the edge of my network, for whatever reason I decide, including irrational reasons. I can and will use any tools at my disposal to control what enters (and leaves) my systems. The problem with end-user solutions that live in the mail client is that by the time spam is deleted, the resource cost has already occured. I much prefer to simply drop connections that I don't want; it still costs me a little bandwidth but I don't waste the disk space and processing cycles that I would if I accepted the spam.
Free speech for everyone is all very well, but the galling thing is that most spam is *deceptive*, using falsified return information or deliberately implicating other innocent third parties. I would settle for allowing all mail to come in iff I can puruse claims for fraud against those who won't play nice. Since this is unlikely to happen any time soon, I'll keep my blocking techniques, thank you very much, and I won't be shedding any tears over the "free speech" rights of spammers - I simply don't recognise any innate "right" to practice deception, especially when it's at my own expense.
These people are busting their butts trying make the business model of ad supported content work so you can read the stuff for free! If you don't like it, send them money!
"Busting their butts"?!? More like shitting their pants that if they can't take some revenue, any revenue, they'll have to go out and get proper jobs like the rest of us. And you want me to reward them for being shysters? I thought the idea was that only success gets rewarded? You think failures should too? I don't make any money off my website either, could you send me some money as well please?
Commercial internet sites cannot make money with nonintrusive advertising.
So what?
This is why thousands of web sites are disappearing every month, and eventually there won't be any free content sites left that are not provided by the people trying to sell you more of the same content. It will hit everyone, even sites like Slashdot
Yea,...and? I don't care. More than that, I'd actually be *glad* if at least some of the crap could be winnowed out. Good riddance. More bandwidth for stuff that matters.
I can't understand the logic of businesses who practice such open hostility towards their (potential) customers. There's a vicious downward spiral - existing ad methods piss people off and therefore become less and less effective. And the response? Make the ads even more annoying! How does that make any sense? There's clearly still a lot more dotcom failures to come yet, because their business models are fundamentally flawed. I don't buy the BS line that "we wouldn't have a free internet" without this kind of crap. Maybe the web would be different (I'd say "better" actually, without all the vapid sites), but the internet itself would continue just fine without these scumbags. I for one will never be forced into the Faustian bargain these companies would have us believe is the only way forward. Maybe it's the only way they'll survive, but that's just tough shit. It's called the "open market", but don't get me started on that one. So what, if the only web sites left are small operations run by enthusiastic hobbyists? Fine with me, that's usually where all the best ideas come from anyway.
Message to these advertisers : sure, you can foist an annoying ad on me. Once. But you surely don't think I'll ever be coming back again, much less spending any money on you?
...why *haven't* MS taken someone to court over this? (as opposed to just bullying eg eBay). Could it be because there's a very good chance these kinds of licences *would* be struck down?
If news outlets are interested in party affiliations, at least corporates certainly aren't : they'll grease the palm of whomever necessary.
Guess you're a republican, then? Why do all/. stories have to get skewed by party politics? Lucky there's only two parties, or we'd never get anything discussed.
Raising the spectre (again) of backdoored crypto or escrow is simply kite flying; it's part of a wider set of measures which will be loudly trumpeted (if not implemented) to give reassurance that something is being done about "security". I have a dollar here says it will never be put into practice.
Recall why the crypto export regulations were lifted in 2000? Because US corporates were screaming that they couldn't compete globally, nor could they secure their communications with their foreign subsidiaries. There is a direct economic impact on companies if they are prevented from using crypto freely (and remember, the health of the economy is the single overriding most important thing to this administration, cf Kyoto et al). I can't believe that even with the lever of "terror prevention" that the gubmint can persuade corporate america to abandon crypto. And it *would* mean abandoning crypto - weakened algorithms aren't just "a bit less secure", they're nothing more than obscuration routines, and we all know the old saw about security and obscurity.
Summary : expect to hear lots of noise about this, especially from people who don't know what they're talking about. Expect even some "real" measures, changes in laws about wiretaps, immigrant detention etc. But I highly doubt that there will be a serious attempt to put the crypto genie back in the bottle. The administration simply isn't that stupid.
Looks like the link you provided is indeed the case referred to in the article. The case I was involved in happened five years earlier in 1990 and I as far as I know, then and now, was the first time there was a conviction in court for a "computer misdemeanour". Just a coincidence that both perps ended up doing 11 months, I guess.
No one that I've read has made a connection between the raids on a major host of arabic websites, more than a week ago and the events of tuesday. Coincidence? Maybe. But it may also indicate that the authorities did have some indications that something was afoot.
The conviction in 1990 wasn't for creating a virus. I know, because I was network manager at one of the sites involved and was responsible for logging network activity which formed part of the evidence. In that case, the individual had found a vulnerability in the ICL 3980 mainframe series - in essence, root password changes were logged to a journal which was publicly readable. He had already taken over several machines in the UK before we were alerted, but as it happened he hadn't managed to root us because we were "slack" in our password changing and the root password hadn't actually been changed for many months. Other more diligant sites who changed the password weekly or monthly weren't so fortunate.
For a couple of weeks I created logs of his connections to our machine; they were traced back to a dial-up connection at one of the colleges in London. Once the evidence was in place, the authorities gave him (I quote the detective who interviewed me) "the wobbly door treatment" one evening, much to the amazement of his mother who was cooking dinner while her son was "playing" with his computer in his bedroom
At the time, the Computer Misuse Act was only just going through parliament and therefore he had to be charged under existing laws. The prosecution case was that modifying the magnetic fields on hard drives amounted to criminal damage, and it was for this that he was tried and convicted. He was sentenced to 12 months, with a further 6 months suspended. He came out after 11 months to an operator job with a company using ICL mainframes.
records IP/port numbers and type of attack of all hacking and breakin attempts and sends the data back to somplace
Dshield is a system that centralises collection of individuals' firewall logs. Personally, I don't think this approach is of much value, but of course YMMV.
In almost all cases, images on sites clearly will be under copyright (nothing published in the US has gone out of copyright since early last century). The real question is whether caching is a "fair use" of that copyrighted material. My opinion : it is fair use, just as the copy that gets made in your RAM and your local cache when you browse the site is fair use. The alternative is that all browsing of copyrighted material is infringing use - that surely doesn't make any kind of sense.
So the above is "off-topic", but this later post saying the same thing is a "+3 Funny"? I'd like to moderate, if it means I can get some of what this moderator's been smoking. Fuckwit.
Force others to break the law?
on
Parasitic Computing
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
If the distributed computation happened to be a routine to circumvent content protection, would all those receiving these packets be in breach of the DMCA?
I was very impressed that they simplified encrytion so it works just like Outlook. Press this button to sign then press this to encrypt
Does it support S/MIME? I looked at the specs on the site, but saw nothing about signing/encryption features (and I can't test it out myself until later). Support for digital certificates is the last remaining reason for me to keep Outlook... my fingers are crossed...
...but I doubt they'll do anything about it. The main point of the reg system wrt the collection of personal info is not the name/email address. It's the cookies. You have to accept 3rd party permanent cookies for the login to work (cf/.)
Why would the NYT give a flying fart about a few thousand individuals of the type who frequent/.? Do you honestly think they're more important and have more clout than NYT's advertising partners? Me neither.
Slashdot Mirror
There are countless examples of companies buying lists that are supposed to be users who have opted-in to receive, only to discover that the list is nothing of the sort (the recent Sainsburys spam incident, for example). I am very sceptical that real lists of opt-ins even exist, despite the bold claims of the spam^H^H^H^H marketers.
Erm, what about admin messages from distribution lists? It's quite likely that they will contain this word. Email filtering needs to be a little smarter than this (cf the nameless organisation whose response to the gone virus was to drop any mail with "hi" in the subject).
Check out the Wired article on the workshop. Preston Padden, head of government relations for Disney, is quoted as saying :
This from the company that bought off the politicians to change the law in the 90s and so prevent Mickey Mouse going out of copyright in 2004. This from the company that appropriates others' intellectual property and claims it as their own (Snow White, Aladdin, Christmas Carol, countless others). They are thieves and liars.
Note that not a single work has gone out of copyright in the US since the first world war. If the corps get their way, nothing will ever go out of copyright again. We will still have a culture, but you'll need to purchase a license to partake of it.
I prefer the term "Digital Rights Infringment" to Digital Rights Management, since the only rights being "managed" are those of the content providers. Where in this technology are the bits that protect my digital rights as a (potential) purchaser of such content? It would seem some rights are more important than others. I always believed that rights came with responsibilities, above all, the responsibility to respect the rights of others. These days, "rights" are what corporations get in return for soft-money bribes.
Old ground for /., I know, but I still think it's worth using using phrases such as "digital rights infringement technology" and "copy inhibited" rather than the corp-friendly "copy protection", especially when you discuss this issue with non-techies. The battle is half lost if we let the very language of the debate be decided by those who would take away our rights.
BMG records already had an embarassing setback with this type of scheme in the UK. Customer returns forced them into withdrawing the copy inhibited version and re-releasing a "standard" CD. They're a business, and cannot sell something which people don't want to buy. Returns cost, in real money as well as bad publicity.
It is your civic duty to protect your rights by buying and returning these CDs. The attempt to force copy inhibited products on us can be defeated simply by making digital rights infringement technologies too expensive to introduce.
I'll stand corrected if you're telling me that Gilmore *doesn't* want to run an open server. Please do go ahead and explain my deep lack of understanding.
Unfortunately, his home page isn't accessible at the moment (coincidence?), but as I recall, his version of the spat with the ISP in question boiled down to "I *founded* this ISP. I can do what I like. The rules for civilised behaviour that everyone else follows don't apply to me. I refuse to accept that the internet is different now than it was in the 80s", with a few layers of bogus arguments about free speech. I have a great deal of respect for John Gilmore, but I think he's wrong on this one.
I'm glad you ignored my post to the point where you responded, but I don't quite see how the stuff you write about hashes fits in - which part of my post is that a response to? I thought this thread was about blacklists of the MAPS and ORBS kind?
I understand that any time I receive any piece of unsolicited email it is because *I* supplied my email address to the spammer
I'm sure there are hundreds of people who have their own stories to prove that the above statement is simply false. Many spam operations build lists of all potential [user]@domain.com addresses; addresses for which the spam doesn't bounce are then added to the "valid address" file (which is typically then sold on to others as being a list of "people who have indicated that they wish to receive email" about whatever they're selling). And this is the point really - this is not about "free speech" or the "rights" of spammers. It's about a bunch of shysters using deceptive business practices to try and turn a dollar, and doing it *at others' expense*.
I support the EFF (inc. with money) but I can't help suspect that John Gilmore's own personal desire to operate an open relay has significantly influenced the EFF into slamming MAPS and praising Brightmail. Has JG's machine just been added to MAPS or something?
I entirely agree that ISPs should not be filtering email without notice or consent and that "end-user" tools are the best solution, but I disagree vehemently that a spammer's right to "free speech" overrides my right to accept or deny data arriving at the edge of my network, for whatever reason I decide, including irrational reasons. I can and will use any tools at my disposal to control what enters (and leaves) my systems. The problem with end-user solutions that live in the mail client is that by the time spam is deleted, the resource cost has already occured. I much prefer to simply drop connections that I don't want; it still costs me a little bandwidth but I don't waste the disk space and processing cycles that I would if I accepted the spam.
Free speech for everyone is all very well, but the galling thing is that most spam is *deceptive*, using falsified return information or deliberately implicating other innocent third parties. I would settle for allowing all mail to come in iff I can puruse claims for fraud against those who won't play nice. Since this is unlikely to happen any time soon, I'll keep my blocking techniques, thank you very much, and I won't be shedding any tears over the "free speech" rights of spammers - I simply don't recognise any innate "right" to practice deception, especially when it's at my own expense.
Embraces the standard 24 hour format but then extends it to a MS 27 hour day; cannot be set except by connecting to MS time server
These people are busting their butts trying make the business model of ad supported content work so you can read the stuff for free! If you don't like it, send them money!
"Busting their butts"?!? More like shitting their pants that if they can't take some revenue, any revenue, they'll have to go out and get proper jobs like the rest of us. And you want me to reward them for being shysters? I thought the idea was that only success gets rewarded? You think failures should too? I don't make any money off my website either, could you send me some money as well please?
Commercial internet sites cannot make money with nonintrusive advertising.
So what?
This is why thousands of web sites are disappearing every month, and eventually there won't be any free content sites left that are not provided by the people trying to sell you more of the same content. It will hit everyone, even sites like Slashdot
Yea, ...and? I don't care. More than that, I'd actually be *glad* if at least some of the crap could be winnowed out. Good riddance. More bandwidth for stuff that matters.
I recall in the late eighties the sheer outrage directed at someone who had the audacity to post a *gasp* commercial message in a newsgroup.
O Tempora! O Mores!
I can't understand the logic of businesses who practice such open hostility towards their (potential) customers. There's a vicious downward spiral - existing ad methods piss people off and therefore become less and less effective. And the response? Make the ads even more annoying! How does that make any sense? There's clearly still a lot more dotcom failures to come yet, because their business models are fundamentally flawed. I don't buy the BS line that "we wouldn't have a free internet" without this kind of crap. Maybe the web would be different (I'd say "better" actually, without all the vapid sites), but the internet itself would continue just fine without these scumbags. I for one will never be forced into the Faustian bargain these companies would have us believe is the only way forward. Maybe it's the only way they'll survive, but that's just tough shit. It's called the "open market", but don't get me started on that one. So what, if the only web sites left are small operations run by enthusiastic hobbyists? Fine with me, that's usually where all the best ideas come from anyway.
Message to these advertisers : sure, you can foist an annoying ad on me. Once. But you surely don't think I'll ever be coming back again, much less spending any money on you?
...why *haven't* MS taken someone to court over this? (as opposed to just bullying eg eBay). Could it be because there's a very good chance these kinds of licences *would* be struck down?
If news outlets are interested in party affiliations, at least corporates certainly aren't : they'll grease the palm of whomever necessary.
Guess you're a republican, then? Why do all /. stories have to get skewed by party politics? Lucky there's only two parties, or we'd never get anything discussed.
Raising the spectre (again) of backdoored crypto or escrow is simply kite flying; it's part of a wider set of measures which will be loudly trumpeted (if not implemented) to give reassurance that something is being done about "security". I have a dollar here says it will never be put into practice.
Recall why the crypto export regulations were lifted in 2000? Because US corporates were screaming that they couldn't compete globally, nor could they secure their communications with their foreign subsidiaries. There is a direct economic impact on companies if they are prevented from using crypto freely (and remember, the health of the economy is the single overriding most important thing to this administration, cf Kyoto et al). I can't believe that even with the lever of "terror prevention" that the gubmint can persuade corporate america to abandon crypto. And it *would* mean abandoning crypto - weakened algorithms aren't just "a bit less secure", they're nothing more than obscuration routines, and we all know the old saw about security and obscurity.
Summary : expect to hear lots of noise about this, especially from people who don't know what they're talking about. Expect even some "real" measures, changes in laws about wiretaps, immigrant detention etc. But I highly doubt that there will be a serious attempt to put the crypto genie back in the bottle. The administration simply isn't that stupid.
Looks like the link you provided is indeed the case referred to in the article. The case I was involved in happened five years earlier in 1990 and I as far as I know, then and now, was the first time there was a conviction in court for a "computer misdemeanour". Just a coincidence that both perps ended up doing 11 months, I guess.
No one that I've read has made a connection between the raids on a major host of arabic websites, more than a week ago and the events of tuesday. Coincidence? Maybe. But it may also indicate that the authorities did have some indications that something was afoot.
The conviction in 1990 wasn't for creating a virus. I know, because I was network manager at one of the sites involved and was responsible for logging network activity which formed part of the evidence. In that case, the individual had found a vulnerability in the ICL 3980 mainframe series - in essence, root password changes were logged to a journal which was publicly readable. He had already taken over several machines in the UK before we were alerted, but as it happened he hadn't managed to root us because we were "slack" in our password changing and the root password hadn't actually been changed for many months. Other more diligant sites who changed the password weekly or monthly weren't so fortunate.
For a couple of weeks I created logs of his connections to our machine; they were traced back to a dial-up connection at one of the colleges in London. Once the evidence was in place, the authorities gave him (I quote the detective who interviewed me) "the wobbly door treatment" one evening, much to the amazement of his mother who was cooking dinner while her son was "playing" with his computer in his bedroom
At the time, the Computer Misuse Act was only just going through parliament and therefore he had to be charged under existing laws. The prosecution case was that modifying the magnetic fields on hard drives amounted to criminal damage, and it was for this that he was tried and convicted. He was sentenced to 12 months, with a further 6 months suspended. He came out after 11 months to an operator job with a company using ICL mainframes.
Dshield is a system that centralises collection of individuals' firewall logs. Personally, I don't think this approach is of much value, but of course YMMV.
In almost all cases, images on sites clearly will be under copyright (nothing published in the US has gone out of copyright since early last century). The real question is whether caching is a "fair use" of that copyrighted material. My opinion : it is fair use, just as the copy that gets made in your RAM and your local cache when you browse the site is fair use. The alternative is that all browsing of copyrighted material is infringing use - that surely doesn't make any kind of sense.
Odd, I could have sworn that John Gilmore sold Cygnus for a sum approaching $700 million. That would make your statement, um, wrong, n'est pas?
So the above is "off-topic", but this later post saying the same thing is a "+3 Funny"? I'd like to moderate, if it means I can get some of what this moderator's been smoking. Fuckwit.
If the distributed computation happened to be a routine to circumvent content protection, would all those receiving these packets be in breach of the DMCA?
Does it support S/MIME? I looked at the specs on the site, but saw nothing about signing/encryption features (and I can't test it out myself until later). Support for digital certificates is the last remaining reason for me to keep Outlook ... my fingers are crossed...
...but I doubt they'll do anything about it. The main point of the reg system wrt the collection of personal info is not the name/email address. It's the cookies. You have to accept 3rd party permanent cookies for the login to work (cf /.)
Why would the NYT give a flying fart about a few thousand individuals of the type who frequent /.? Do you honestly think they're more important and have more clout than NYT's advertising partners? Me neither.