I know it's been posted before, but there's no harm in doing it again...
You can locate your legislators at www.congress.org. If you choose to contact them, keep these things in mind:
DO NOT send e-mail. It will be ignored.
Only send a fax as a last resort.
Letters and phone calls are best.
Don't use prewritten letters unless you absolutely have to. No, don't even use them then. They won't be taken as seriously as a letter you compose yourself.
If you decide to call, you're going to get a staffer. Prepare for them to be relatively clueless on this issue, at least at first. Have your facts in front of you so you'll be able to answer any questions they may have.
Know your facts. Know the bill number, the bill name, all the sponsors, and where the bill is in terms of passage. If you can't get all of this information, at least get the bill number and make sure it's correct because the person you speak to may want to find a copy of the legislation, and they'll need that number to do it.
If you call, it's not a bad idea to follow up with a letter.
In your written or verbal conversations, be polite, but make sure the person on the other end knows that this is something you care about and that will influence your vote in the next election.
And if this is going to work, spread the word to other organizations and people who can help oppose it. Do you subscribe to a magazine that would be interested in this? Send a letter to the editor. Does Consumer Reports print letters to the editor? If they do, send one their way. Lots of people read that magazine, people who may not otherwise find out about this.
Talk radio may be another useful outlet. If your local station has a show that has open discussions about any subject of interest to listeners, call in. Calling in to CNET Radio would be a good place to start. The CNET site says you can tune in at 910 AM in the Bay Area, at 890 AM in Boston, and on XM Satellite Radio, channel 130. Most every city has at least one talk station, so there are many places to call in.
There are other things you can do. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper. If you get it published, great. Even if you don't, someone there has to read it, so at least the newspsper people will be educated, so they'll be more sensitized to the issue when they see it again.
Whatever you do, think of it in terms of getting information to the right people. With Congress, it's getting lots of people to contact them. With the public, it's getting as many people as possible familiar with the issue. It's a numbers game. Just don't forget that most people don't get their information primarily through the Internet. They log on to get their daily fix of the large Web sites and then log off. They may care about this, but you're going to have to reach them offline. Be creative. Think of it as a way to beat the big media companies at their own game. These guys most likely think they can get this garbage passed without the public ever knowing. Let's prove them wrong.
As a matter of fact, CNET Radio just reported on this thing. It was the last item in their newscast, and the whole report lasted about 20 seconds. That needs to get changed, and only our action can change it.
Don't be so sure. Many times, a bill that can't pass by itself is tacked onto some other bill as an amendment. The larger bill is usually a budget bill or some other piece of legislation that seems likely to pass. This way, the unpopular bill gets more of a free ride than it would otherwise. This tactic often works, unless the unpopular legislation is so unpopular that it acts as a "poison pill", killing whatever legislation it's attached to. A "poison pill" tactic is often used to derail legislation that a committee it passes through doesn't like but that may pass the House or Senate unmodified.
My point: Don't rule out any tactic, no matter how unlikely or slimy it might seem.
I'm in the same boat you are, and I'm pretty pissed off, especially because I just renewed my annual subscription. And now I'm told I have to pay again? Bullshit! I'm in the process of looking for somewhere else to transfer my domain and get e-mail hosting. I don't care if it's cheaper than Yahoo will be after these new charges. I'm just not going to let them screw me like this. My hope is to find a good registrar with a POP3 e-mail package at a reasonable price.
Last year, I signed up for their Personal Address service, where for $35/year, you get a domain that they host for you. Basically, it's an alias that points back to your Yahoo address. The thing is, you can have up to five addresses in your domain for that price. Not bad for mail hosting. Naturally, I got my mail using POP3. Now they want to pull this shit, and only a month after I renewed my subscription. I feel like I just got ripped off.
I'm not going to cough up $19.95/year for this. I'll take my domain and transfer it to someplace like Stargate. At least they give me one POP3 address with domain registration. Are there any other registrars who will register a domain for a good price and throw in more than one POP3 mailbox with it that I ought to be looking at?
"The real trouble comes when trying to determine which of the spam that says I can opt-out actually means it, and which of the spam is just harvesting/validating my address."
Most all of it is bogus. Here are the criteria I use:
If I don't recognize the message from a Web site I gave my e-mail address to, I consider it spam. Any reputable opt-in message will tell you where you signed up to receive it.
If the message was sent through an open mail server, it's spam.
If the source of the message appears to be a dial-up POP, it's almost certainly spam. This one isn't a given, but it's a decent rule of thumb.
Since most spam nowadays uses the remove list as a trick to validate addresses, I prefer to assume that I didn't opt in. I'm very careful about keeping copies of subscription confirmations, so if, after I complain about a message, the sender wants to bitch that their message isn't spam because I opted in (hasn't happened yet), I'd just demand to know what site I signed up for it at and where my confirmation message is. Anyone not doing double opt-in is running a sloppy list, to say the least.
But to get back to the original/. article, I find the whole thing amusing because you can't sell an opt-in list and still call it opt-in. If I sign up to get mail from Amazon, I most certainly did not give my permission to hear from Books-A-Million. Once that list is sold or traded, the messages coming from the new list owner are spam, plain and simple, because I never asked to hear from them.
Good Lord, man, that sounds like what some people I knew in college might have done, except that they would have used New Kids on the Block and Debbie Gibson CDs.
Oh, he'll have plenty of opportunities to earn one after he's sent up the river. He may think he's being cute now, but it won't seem so funny when he makes some smartass comment to his cellmate and gets the shit kicked out of him.
And I do know that it isn't a done deal that he'll go to prison, but he's doing a fantastic job of pissing off the judge, the guy who will have a lot to do with making that decision. Yeah, that's real smart, kid.
My vote goes to getting more stories on him. It'll be amusing to watch as this guy flushes his life down the toilet. What a total moron.
I'll go for that. And no one can argue that there aren't free alternatives. Pegasus Mail is free, and it's immune to auto-executing worms. The only kind that can still run are executables, but the way the program displays mail means the user has to try a little harder to find the file and run it. Add to that the fact that mass-mailing worms are currently written to look at Microsoft address books and not Pegasus's, and you have a pretty good solution.
I don't have a problem with signed code, as long as:
I, as the user, can choose to look at code signed by my choice of certificate authorities.
I can choose to disregard these signatures or the lack of a signature and run the code anyway.
I can sign code myself, independently of who wrote it and who else has signed it. This would be a great benefit in a business environment, where you only want users to run approved software.
If the process didn't meet these criteria, I wouldn't want anything to do with it.
Or they'd forbid you from running "unauthorized" software on a Windows machine. Then they'd charge software vendors a fee to have their software authorized.
Agreed! If some of these marketing people had their way, we'd be exposed to ads 24/7.
As for ads in the bathroom, check out your local bar. I've seen many with miniature billboards on the wall behind the toilet. I guess they figured if people read what folks scrawl on the bathroom walls, they'll read anything. Although, I'm not sure if I'd want my product associated with a bar bathroom.
And we can't forget about the scheme Swatch cooked up in which they were going to beam ads from a ham radio satellite, blatantly in violation of regulations stating that ham radio frequencies are noncommercial.
Then there was the one where this company would wrap your car with ads in the same way that city buses are done. At least they were going to pay a decent amount for it. I guess they were a victim of the dot-bomb fallout.
As for ads on the moon, I don't know about that, but I do know there was a plan back around the late 1980s to launch a huge plastic sheet into low orbit. It was supposed to be visible in the evening sky. I think the original one was supposed to be a green dot, but real ads were to follow if that one was successful.
I'm waiting for some company to see if they can cut a deal with the government to put ads on money. After all, we handle a lot of it (well, some people do, anyway), and it passes from person to person quite often. It's only a matter of time, I'm guessing.
Got a browser competing with you, embed IE into the OS. Got Citrix competing with you, embed terminal services into the OS. Got Oracle competing with you, embed the DB.
Kinda reminds me of what the Master Control Program in the movie TRON would do. If it found a program it deemed useful, it would absorb it into itself. If the program wasn't useful to the MCP, the MCP would destroy it.
The more I see of Microsoft's business practices, and the more times I watch TRON, the more I think there are an awful lot of similarities there.
The really amusing part is that, if you look on the summary printed on the back cover of the DVD case, you'll see the MCP referred to as the Master Control Panel. That was on the original DVD release. I haven't bought the special edition, so I have no idea if it's been changed.
Re:I thought the article missed the point.
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· Score: 2
Working on it now. I hope others are doing the same.
"Mr. Gates, we have some more information on the antitrust people. Seems that they got together last night during that attorneys general convention to discuss strategy. Here's the full transcript for you to review. Several copies, actually. Seems they had several laptops sitting around. Uh, ignore this one here. Too many extraneous phrases from some drunk guy talking about how they don't make vodka the way they used to."
"Thanks Steve. God, I love technology! OK, leave those machines alone for a while, until they stop reporting anything useful. Then, pull the unique IDs for them and shut them down during the next round of automatic software updates. Oh yeah, and don't forget to delete the IDs from the reactivation database, since they'll doubtless call in when their systems go down. We'll teach these bastards not to screw with us."
I thought the article missed the point.
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I thought the article missed the point. Many people are going to come away from reading it thinking, "I don't want one of these crippled computers, so I won't buy one, no matter how much I see ads for them." They aren't going to appreciate the fact that the media companies don't want this to be a choice we have--they want to ram these things down our throats. They know damn well that, given the choice, no one will want them, so they want to pass a law like the SSSCA to force the issue. That is what people need to understand.
But this article is a great opportunity for anyone interested to write a letter to the editor of the Times. Getting published won't be easy, but it's possible, now more so than ever, since the paper has given this issue publicity. So if you want to write, here's your chance. They have an e-mail address for submissions:
letters at nytimes dot com (munged to prevet spam)
I wasn't able to locate a postal address on the Web site for letters to the editor, but maybe someone else will have that available and post it here.
I sympathize with your situation, but I have to disagree. These blocks were put in place because the offending ISPs refused to do anything about spam. I've been out of the anti-spam discussions on Usenet for a few years now, but when I was there, Hong Kong ISPs were some of the world's worst. Sending a complaint to them would either get you no response, or, worse, the ISP would just pass it along to the spammer, who would then likely send you a few thousand messages for your trouble. Faced with that kind of attitude, responsible sysadmins did the only thing they could: block these ISPs outright.
Now we get to the part about removing these blocks. Do you know if your ISP still has a spam problem? If it does, call them and express your dissatisfaction with their service. You pay your hard-earned money to these people, and you deserve a clean, professionally-run operation. Do they have an abuse desk that responds to spam complaints in a professional and timely manner? They should. Do they have their mail servers secured? They should. Do they know who the local troublemakers (spammers, script kiddies, etc.) are and refuse to keep letting them sign up for accounts? They should. In short, when they get their house in order, the blocks will come down. It may take a while, but it'll happen. They may want to get someone to post to a newsgroup like news.admin.net-abuse.email and let folks there know that they're working to get their spam problem under control. That will get them unblocked sooner.
If you really want to get the attention of your local ISPs, look into forming a Hong Kong chapter of CAUCE. This has been done in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, and India. Go to www.cauce.org and ask them how to get it up and running. If there was ever a time to do this, it'd be now.
Yeah, but good salesmen don't insult potential customers, either. I know, I know, the company probably won't ever be a customer, but it's still not something you do, if for no other reason than the word might get out that MS salesmen insult people...kind of like the word just got out here. A good salesman approaches a potential customer and tries to help them find a solution to their problems through what he's selling. If that potential customer already has a solution, the best you can do is try to show that your solution is better. If you can't do that, you thank the person for their time and go away, but under no circumstances do you try to disparage what the customer is using now because, indirectly, you're disparaging the person you're speaking to.
Never thought about that. And besides, I'm not sure how a magnet is supposed to attract chicks. Besides, there are so many of them around during the Easter season anyway, all fluffy and yellow and stuff, except for the ones that get dyed other colors.
Oh wait, you mean we aren't talking about that kind of chick? Never mind, then.
I think you're right that it was done intentionally. Assuming these mailing lists require new subs to confirm subscriptions, then someone who could receive mail at the magazine's address had to do the confirmation in order to get the loop going. If that's the case, I'd guess that it was an employee there who was pissed off at someone and who decided to do some damage. OTOH, if the mailing lists don't require confirmation, then anyone could have done it. All they'd have had to do was sub the magazine's address to the mailing list and vice versa.
"Oh but we can't organize and attempt to fight this thing. See, this is a foregone conclusion. It's going to happen, no matter what we do, so why should we do anything?"
See, that's what many people are thinking, and that's why they won't get off their Quake-playing asses to do anything. But to refresh some people's memory, there was this bill proposed a few years ago by Sen. Frank Murkowski that would have essentially legalized spam. It was quietly pushed through the Senate almost unanimously, and it looked ready to steamroll its way through the House. I mean, this thing was seen as a done deal, with backing from all the right people, including the Direct Marketing Association. What happened? People spread the word, and the phones in Washington started ringing off the hook with calls from ordinary computer users who were just plain pissed off. And guess what? The bill died in a House subcommittee.
So, if you want the SSSCA to pass, then keep sitting there, grumbling on this forum, and doing nothing. Few in Washington have even heard of Slashdot, and even those who have don't give a damn what we talk about here. You know why? Because, as long as we sit here and moan, groan, and bitch, we're totally impotent. We're a paper tiger because we won't do anything, so there's no risk in pissing us off. So, for God's sake, do something. You want some ideas? Here, choose from these:
Write letters to your Senator or Congressman.
Call your Senator or Congressman.
Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper.
If you're in college, write a guest column in your college newspaper. They're often starved for content, so you have a good chance of getting accepted. The same goes for alternative newspapers. You know whether you have one in your area, so use it.
Call into your local talk radio show. Prepare yourself for what you're going to say, but don't let it sound canned.
Call into Rush Limbaugh's show. I know, I know. Most people here probably don't like him, but he doesn't like Hollywood, so take advantage of that fact. He'll also love the fact that Democrats tended to like this bill and Republicans didn't. Whether you think this is a partisan issue or not doesn't matter. Use the leverage that's given to you.
Tell your friends about this. They probably don't know, and they won't find out from the media.
If you're in a political organization, see if you can get it mobilized. If you're in a chapter of the College Democrats, definitely see if you can get it mobilized. See, if you can get elements of a political party to turn on each other, you can have all kinds of fun because I imagine the good Senator Hollings and his colleagues won't anticipate this. And if you're in the Young Republicans, you also need to get involved. And if chapters of the College Democrats and Young Republicans can manage to get together and agree on opposing this, some people in Washington will begin to get really antsy.
If all you want to do is sit at your computer, then design a button/banner/whatever for your Web site and link to some relevant info. Better yet, get organized with others who want to do this. If everyone has different buttons and links, it'll still get the word out, but not as well as a thousand sites with the same button and link. Think saturation advertising, and you'll get the idea.
Pick one or more things from the list, or come up with something of your own. Just get off your ass and do something!
You're right, some will figure out ways around it. However, I think that many won't. There are many people out there who don't have a clue as to what goes on inside that little metal box. I got a call from a friend a couple of weeks ago who wanted to move the hard drive from his old PC to his new one in order to transfer the files over, and when he was calling me, he was trying to figure out how to remove the CPU from the motherboard. When I asked him what he wanted to do that for, he said, "That's the hard drive, isn't it?"
I do think some people will learn how to bypass copy controls, but many will be clueless. To many of them, the computer might as well work using magic because that's about the extent of their understanding of it.
More importantly for the media companies, they don't want to piss off regular, average users too much. OK, this may seem like a stupid comment based on their efforts to use copy protection to restrict anything and everything, including our ability to hum songs in the shower, but think about this for a second. If they use technological restrictions, then people probably will blame the tecnology, but that blame may not filter directly back to media companies. If Jonh Q. Public buys a new PC that won't let him copy his CDs, then he may be pissed, but he may not lay all the blame at the doorstep of the media companies. And if they shut down the file sharing systems, the smae thing happens. Buf if regular people get sued, not only does that take more effort to do, but it will hit home to many people. The reaction would probably go along the lines of, "I give these #$%$@!^ record companies all my hard-earned cash, and those ^&#$*&@$ are going after _me_ for swapping a few songs here and there?! I'll never give them another red cent!" People are already getting pissed off, but I suspect that the effect would be magnified if they were suing the users.
Why do politicians listen to lobbyists? Money. Lots of money. The lobbyists and politicians can call it whatever they want, but it's bribery, plain and simple.
Why don't average people care? I suspect there are several reasons. First, when you have two candidates running, and one is just as bad as the other, then people feel there's no reason to care. They figure they'll get screwed either way. Maybe one will screw them differently than the other, but the end result will be about the same either way.
The next reason people don't care is because they don't know. Does anyone with an IQ greater than their shoe size really believe that they get any news of importance from CNN? Newspapers may be better, but newspaper readership is declining. And few are willing to go out and search for alternative news outlets. They're there, but people don't seek them out. I suspect it's the same reason people get on AOL and never move beyond that. Folks get comfortable with what's familiar and don't want to get off their asses and explore.
Finally, people don't care because many of them don't get the connection between these events and their lives. "How will restricting civil liberties affect me? I'm not doing anything wrong or illegal." Problem is, it never occurs to these people that "wrong" or "illegal" are terms that are easily redefined by those who happen to be in power at the time. It also never occurs to them that laws are often used as weapons against those who are, for whatever reason, out of favor with those in power. In short, people don't care because they don't understand how these things affect them when all they want to do is eat, sleep, have sex, be entertained, and otherwise live comfortably numb lives.
Nope, I read it before posting it. The fact is that Mr. Atabay resisted scrambling the signal for as long as he could, but he was going bankrupt for lack of funding. And even after scrambling, he's only doing it every other day, mainly to remind those who can pay that they should support the programming. Obviously, no scrambling would be preferable, but when the money's gone, he'll have no choice but to sign off the air, and he doesn't seem to be getting much help from anyone else.
What I was referring to when I mentioned squeezing money out of viewers is the fact that the big media companies are more interested in seeing how they can restrict their broadcasts (copy protection, eliminating PVRs) so they can open new revenue streams instead of actually providing interesting and informative programming.
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I know it's been posted before, but there's no harm in doing it again...
You can locate your legislators at www.congress.org. If you choose to contact them, keep these things in mind:
And if this is going to work, spread the word to other organizations and people who can help oppose it. Do you subscribe to a magazine that would be interested in this? Send a letter to the editor. Does Consumer Reports print letters to the editor? If they do, send one their way. Lots of people read that magazine, people who may not otherwise find out about this.
Talk radio may be another useful outlet. If your local station has a show that has open discussions about any subject of interest to listeners, call in. Calling in to CNET Radio would be a good place to start. The CNET site says you can tune in at 910 AM in the Bay Area, at 890 AM in Boston, and on XM Satellite Radio, channel 130. Most every city has at least one talk station, so there are many places to call in.
There are other things you can do. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper. If you get it published, great. Even if you don't, someone there has to read it, so at least the newspsper people will be educated, so they'll be more sensitized to the issue when they see it again.
Whatever you do, think of it in terms of getting information to the right people. With Congress, it's getting lots of people to contact them. With the public, it's getting as many people as possible familiar with the issue. It's a numbers game. Just don't forget that most people don't get their information primarily through the Internet. They log on to get their daily fix of the large Web sites and then log off. They may care about this, but you're going to have to reach them offline. Be creative. Think of it as a way to beat the big media companies at their own game. These guys most likely think they can get this garbage passed without the public ever knowing. Let's prove them wrong.
As a matter of fact, CNET Radio just reported on this thing. It was the last item in their newscast, and the whole report lasted about 20 seconds. That needs to get changed, and only our action can change it.
Don't be so sure. Many times, a bill that can't pass by itself is tacked onto some other bill as an amendment. The larger bill is usually a budget bill or some other piece of legislation that seems likely to pass. This way, the unpopular bill gets more of a free ride than it would otherwise. This tactic often works, unless the unpopular legislation is so unpopular that it acts as a "poison pill", killing whatever legislation it's attached to. A "poison pill" tactic is often used to derail legislation that a committee it passes through doesn't like but that may pass the House or Senate unmodified.
My point: Don't rule out any tactic, no matter how unlikely or slimy it might seem.
I'm in the same boat you are, and I'm pretty pissed off, especially because I just renewed my annual subscription. And now I'm told I have to pay again? Bullshit! I'm in the process of looking for somewhere else to transfer my domain and get e-mail hosting. I don't care if it's cheaper than Yahoo will be after these new charges. I'm just not going to let them screw me like this. My hope is to find a good registrar with a POP3 e-mail package at a reasonable price.
Last year, I signed up for their Personal Address service, where for $35/year, you get a domain that they host for you. Basically, it's an alias that points back to your Yahoo address. The thing is, you can have up to five addresses in your domain for that price. Not bad for mail hosting. Naturally, I got my mail using POP3. Now they want to pull this shit, and only a month after I renewed my subscription. I feel like I just got ripped off.
I'm not going to cough up $19.95/year for this. I'll take my domain and transfer it to someplace like Stargate. At least they give me one POP3 address with domain registration. Are there any other registrars who will register a domain for a good price and throw in more than one POP3 mailbox with it that I ought to be looking at?
"The real trouble comes when trying to determine which of the spam that says I can opt-out actually means it, and which of the spam is just harvesting/validating my address."
Most all of it is bogus. Here are the criteria I use:
Since most spam nowadays uses the remove list as a trick to validate addresses, I prefer to assume that I didn't opt in. I'm very careful about keeping copies of subscription confirmations, so if, after I complain about a message, the sender wants to bitch that their message isn't spam because I opted in (hasn't happened yet), I'd just demand to know what site I signed up for it at and where my confirmation message is. Anyone not doing double opt-in is running a sloppy list, to say the least.
But to get back to the original /. article, I find the whole thing amusing because you can't sell an opt-in list and still call it opt-in. If I sign up to get mail from Amazon, I most certainly did not give my permission to hear from Books-A-Million. Once that list is sold or traded, the messages coming from the new list owner are spam, plain and simple, because I never asked to hear from them.
Good Lord, man, that sounds like what some people I knew in college might have done, except that they would have used New Kids on the Block and Debbie Gibson CDs.
Oh wait, it's Deborah Gibson now. Sorry Debbie.
Oh, he'll have plenty of opportunities to earn one after he's sent up the river. He may think he's being cute now, but it won't seem so funny when he makes some smartass comment to his cellmate and gets the shit kicked out of him.
And I do know that it isn't a done deal that he'll go to prison, but he's doing a fantastic job of pissing off the judge, the guy who will have a lot to do with making that decision. Yeah, that's real smart, kid.
My vote goes to getting more stories on him. It'll be amusing to watch as this guy flushes his life down the toilet. What a total moron.
I'll go for that. And no one can argue that there aren't free alternatives. Pegasus Mail is free, and it's immune to auto-executing worms. The only kind that can still run are executables, but the way the program displays mail means the user has to try a little harder to find the file and run it. Add to that the fact that mass-mailing worms are currently written to look at Microsoft address books and not Pegasus's, and you have a pretty good solution.
And it ain't a half-bad e-mail client.
I don't have a problem with signed code, as long as:
If the process didn't meet these criteria, I wouldn't want anything to do with it.
Or they'd forbid you from running "unauthorized" software on a Windows machine. Then they'd charge software vendors a fee to have their software authorized.
Agreed! If some of these marketing people had their way, we'd be exposed to ads 24/7.
As for ads in the bathroom, check out your local bar. I've seen many with miniature billboards on the wall behind the toilet. I guess they figured if people read what folks scrawl on the bathroom walls, they'll read anything. Although, I'm not sure if I'd want my product associated with a bar bathroom.
And we can't forget about the scheme Swatch cooked up in which they were going to beam ads from a ham radio satellite, blatantly in violation of regulations stating that ham radio frequencies are noncommercial.
Then there was the one where this company would wrap your car with ads in the same way that city buses are done. At least they were going to pay a decent amount for it. I guess they were a victim of the dot-bomb fallout.
As for ads on the moon, I don't know about that, but I do know there was a plan back around the late 1980s to launch a huge plastic sheet into low orbit. It was supposed to be visible in the evening sky. I think the original one was supposed to be a green dot, but real ads were to follow if that one was successful.
I'm waiting for some company to see if they can cut a deal with the government to put ads on money. After all, we handle a lot of it (well, some people do, anyway), and it passes from person to person quite often. It's only a matter of time, I'm guessing.
Kinda reminds me of what the Master Control Program in the movie TRON would do. If it found a program it deemed useful, it would absorb it into itself. If the program wasn't useful to the MCP, the MCP would destroy it.
The more I see of Microsoft's business practices, and the more times I watch TRON, the more I think there are an awful lot of similarities there.
The really amusing part is that, if you look on the summary printed on the back cover of the DVD case, you'll see the MCP referred to as the Master Control Panel. That was on the original DVD release. I haven't bought the special edition, so I have no idea if it's been changed.
Working on it now. I hope others are doing the same.
"Mr. Gates, we have some more information on the antitrust people. Seems that they got together last night during that attorneys general convention to discuss strategy. Here's the full transcript for you to review. Several copies, actually. Seems they had several laptops sitting around. Uh, ignore this one here. Too many extraneous phrases from some drunk guy talking about how they don't make vodka the way they used to."
"Thanks Steve. God, I love technology! OK, leave those machines alone for a while, until they stop reporting anything useful. Then, pull the unique IDs for them and shut them down during the next round of automatic software updates. Oh yeah, and don't forget to delete the IDs from the reactivation database, since they'll doubtless call in when their systems go down. We'll teach these bastards not to screw with us."
I thought the article missed the point. Many people are going to come away from reading it thinking, "I don't want one of these crippled computers, so I won't buy one, no matter how much I see ads for them." They aren't going to appreciate the fact that the media companies don't want this to be a choice we have--they want to ram these things down our throats. They know damn well that, given the choice, no one will want them, so they want to pass a law like the SSSCA to force the issue. That is what people need to understand.
But this article is a great opportunity for anyone interested to write a letter to the editor of the Times. Getting published won't be easy, but it's possible, now more so than ever, since the paper has given this issue publicity. So if you want to write, here's your chance. They have an e-mail address for submissions:
letters at nytimes dot com (munged to prevet spam)
I wasn't able to locate a postal address on the Web site for letters to the editor, but maybe someone else will have that available and post it here.
I sympathize with your situation, but I have to disagree. These blocks were put in place because the offending ISPs refused to do anything about spam. I've been out of the anti-spam discussions on Usenet for a few years now, but when I was there, Hong Kong ISPs were some of the world's worst. Sending a complaint to them would either get you no response, or, worse, the ISP would just pass it along to the spammer, who would then likely send you a few thousand messages for your trouble. Faced with that kind of attitude, responsible sysadmins did the only thing they could: block these ISPs outright.
Now we get to the part about removing these blocks. Do you know if your ISP still has a spam problem? If it does, call them and express your dissatisfaction with their service. You pay your hard-earned money to these people, and you deserve a clean, professionally-run operation. Do they have an abuse desk that responds to spam complaints in a professional and timely manner? They should. Do they have their mail servers secured? They should. Do they know who the local troublemakers (spammers, script kiddies, etc.) are and refuse to keep letting them sign up for accounts? They should. In short, when they get their house in order, the blocks will come down. It may take a while, but it'll happen. They may want to get someone to post to a newsgroup like news.admin.net-abuse.email and let folks there know that they're working to get their spam problem under control. That will get them unblocked sooner.
If you really want to get the attention of your local ISPs, look into forming a Hong Kong chapter of CAUCE. This has been done in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, and India. Go to www.cauce.org and ask them how to get it up and running. If there was ever a time to do this, it'd be now.
Yeah, but good salesmen don't insult potential customers, either. I know, I know, the company probably won't ever be a customer, but it's still not something you do, if for no other reason than the word might get out that MS salesmen insult people...kind of like the word just got out here. A good salesman approaches a potential customer and tries to help them find a solution to their problems through what he's selling. If that potential customer already has a solution, the best you can do is try to show that your solution is better. If you can't do that, you thank the person for their time and go away, but under no circumstances do you try to disparage what the customer is using now because, indirectly, you're disparaging the person you're speaking to.
won't the magnets screw up the switch?
Never thought about that. And besides, I'm not sure how a magnet is supposed to attract chicks. Besides, there are so many of them around during the Easter season anyway, all fluffy and yellow and stuff, except for the ones that get dyed other colors.
Oh wait, you mean we aren't talking about that kind of chick? Never mind, then.
Well, if it works as planned, I guess I'll have to head over to a toy store near me.
Although...wouldn't a Tux Borg be cooler? I wonder how that'd affect the chick magnet factor, though.
I think you're right that it was done intentionally. Assuming these mailing lists require new subs to confirm subscriptions, then someone who could receive mail at the magazine's address had to do the confirmation in order to get the loop going. If that's the case, I'd guess that it was an employee there who was pissed off at someone and who decided to do some damage. OTOH, if the mailing lists don't require confirmation, then anyone could have done it. All they'd have had to do was sub the magazine's address to the mailing list and vice versa.
"Oh but we can't organize and attempt to fight this thing. See, this is a foregone conclusion. It's going to happen, no matter what we do, so why should we do anything?"
See, that's what many people are thinking, and that's why they won't get off their Quake-playing asses to do anything. But to refresh some people's memory, there was this bill proposed a few years ago by Sen. Frank Murkowski that would have essentially legalized spam. It was quietly pushed through the Senate almost unanimously, and it looked ready to steamroll its way through the House. I mean, this thing was seen as a done deal, with backing from all the right people, including the Direct Marketing Association. What happened? People spread the word, and the phones in Washington started ringing off the hook with calls from ordinary computer users who were just plain pissed off. And guess what? The bill died in a House subcommittee.
So, if you want the SSSCA to pass, then keep sitting there, grumbling on this forum, and doing nothing. Few in Washington have even heard of Slashdot, and even those who have don't give a damn what we talk about here. You know why? Because, as long as we sit here and moan, groan, and bitch, we're totally impotent. We're a paper tiger because we won't do anything, so there's no risk in pissing us off. So, for God's sake, do something. You want some ideas? Here, choose from these:
Pick one or more things from the list, or come up with something of your own. Just get off your ass and do something!
You're right, some will figure out ways around it. However, I think that many won't. There are many people out there who don't have a clue as to what goes on inside that little metal box. I got a call from a friend a couple of weeks ago who wanted to move the hard drive from his old PC to his new one in order to transfer the files over, and when he was calling me, he was trying to figure out how to remove the CPU from the motherboard. When I asked him what he wanted to do that for, he said, "That's the hard drive, isn't it?"
I do think some people will learn how to bypass copy controls, but many will be clueless. To many of them, the computer might as well work using magic because that's about the extent of their understanding of it.
More importantly for the media companies, they don't want to piss off regular, average users too much. OK, this may seem like a stupid comment based on their efforts to use copy protection to restrict anything and everything, including our ability to hum songs in the shower, but think about this for a second. If they use technological restrictions, then people probably will blame the tecnology, but that blame may not filter directly back to media companies. If Jonh Q. Public buys a new PC that won't let him copy his CDs, then he may be pissed, but he may not lay all the blame at the doorstep of the media companies. And if they shut down the file sharing systems, the smae thing happens. Buf if regular people get sued, not only does that take more effort to do, but it will hit home to many people. The reaction would probably go along the lines of, "I give these #$%$@!^ record companies all my hard-earned cash, and those ^&#$*&@$ are going after _me_ for swapping a few songs here and there?! I'll never give them another red cent!" People are already getting pissed off, but I suspect that the effect would be magnified if they were suing the users.
Why do politicians listen to lobbyists? Money. Lots of money. The lobbyists and politicians can call it whatever they want, but it's bribery, plain and simple.
Why don't average people care? I suspect there are several reasons. First, when you have two candidates running, and one is just as bad as the other, then people feel there's no reason to care. They figure they'll get screwed either way. Maybe one will screw them differently than the other, but the end result will be about the same either way.
The next reason people don't care is because they don't know. Does anyone with an IQ greater than their shoe size really believe that they get any news of importance from CNN? Newspapers may be better, but newspaper readership is declining. And few are willing to go out and search for alternative news outlets. They're there, but people don't seek them out. I suspect it's the same reason people get on AOL and never move beyond that. Folks get comfortable with what's familiar and don't want to get off their asses and explore.
Finally, people don't care because many of them don't get the connection between these events and their lives. "How will restricting civil liberties affect me? I'm not doing anything wrong or illegal." Problem is, it never occurs to these people that "wrong" or "illegal" are terms that are easily redefined by those who happen to be in power at the time. It also never occurs to them that laws are often used as weapons against those who are, for whatever reason, out of favor with those in power. In short, people don't care because they don't understand how these things affect them when all they want to do is eat, sleep, have sex, be entertained, and otherwise live comfortably numb lives.
Nope, I read it before posting it. The fact is that Mr. Atabay resisted scrambling the signal for as long as he could, but he was going bankrupt for lack of funding. And even after scrambling, he's only doing it every other day, mainly to remind those who can pay that they should support the programming. Obviously, no scrambling would be preferable, but when the money's gone, he'll have no choice but to sign off the air, and he doesn't seem to be getting much help from anyone else.
What I was referring to when I mentioned squeezing money out of viewers is the fact that the big media companies are more interested in seeing how they can restrict their broadcasts (copy protection, eliminating PVRs) so they can open new revenue streams instead of actually providing interesting and informative programming.