It clearly says "in case of invasion." We're invading Iraq, aren't we? The founding fathers couldn't have actually meant to limit the power of the president.
But Iraq hasn't invaded the US. Also there's the additional precondition of public safety requiring it.
The Bush administration is the most corrupt administration the U.S. has ever had.
Rather at least the most overtly corrupt. Maybe it's more a case of improved communications exposing this corruption, whilst the administration is still in office...
The problem is that you have an old and ambiguously worded constitution
Actually the US Consitution is written in more or less "plain English". The problem is simply one of age. With the common meaning of some words (not always the dictionary definition) having changed in the intervening time.
that is being treated as a religious text, interpreted by various "high priests".
You know, who ever declared that Alberto Gonzales has the right to live? Anyone?
Quite the contrary. The penalty for treason is hanging. Don't they swear them in with an oath to protect the Constitution?
If a government official enguages in treason then the actual offence is "High Treason". Whilst capital punishment tends to be the sentence here it need to be restricted to hanging.
See I could have said Repblicans and got modded up.;-)
What about "Republicrats" or "Democans"? No body's yet asked if these programs have an IQ higher or lower than the average Congresscritter. Possibly more relevent if they are cheaper to bribe...
Or stopped being obsessed about their kid not seeing any sex or violence. It's not going to kill them or damage them or pervert them unless they're the victim. And even then they are likely to survive it and be okay eventually.
What "kids shouldn't see" tends to be very ethnocentric. If some cultures it's sex in others it's violence. Also inculded are factors such as "cartoon" violence or "clean" violence (which dosn't show any bodies) is ok, but violence showing actual injury is not. Of course the ultimate example here is violent "sport" equals "family entertainment" and accidental (brief) showing of a woman's nipple in the midpoint entertainment for the same sport equals massive fines to broadcaster.
It seems they do not understand that a communicating piece of software may not only cause problems for its users, but also for the people that communicate with it (the other end).
If they understood that they'd probably also understand that a "communicating piece of software" should follow the specifications for the communication protocol(s) it perports to use:)
If you're seriously suggesting bombing a country in order to stop spam, please seek professional help.
In terms of actual harm to Americans spam is rather more of a problem than the various excuses the US had recently been using to bomb places.
As for the real world, if you blow the crap out of Angola, the spammers move on to another country.
Yet the US Government dosn't see this as a problem with "Al Quada"...
Directly? The transaction doesn't go through. The bank would refuse it. However, if you really wanted a Cuban product, you could pay someone in Canada to buy it for you and ship it to you.
Thus the same can be done for spammers. Except that whilst Canadians think embagoing Cuba is daft they might be more receptive to stopping real criminals. The most likely response would be that all the spammers would move to a country the US would never bomb or embargo (I.E. the one the US Government had been illegally throwing money at.)
You have a right to free speech, but you DON'T have a right to be heard. In other words, you cannot use forceful or otherwise subversive methods to "ensure your speech is heard."
Such "subversive" methods would include misrepresenting what you are doing and trespassing on private property.
If someone doesn't want to hear it, that take precedence over anyone's right to free speech.
They have the right to ignore you, go somewhere you can't go or respond to whatever you are saying.
First, I agree that only I should decide what I'm interested in. I don't want spam to be illegal in the sense that someone else decides what is okay to mail, but rather that it should be illegal to mail me stuff if I've requested that you don't. Because after I request that you don't, it starts becoming harassment. Of course with spam there are so many people doing it that asking each one individually wouldn't do a thing to reduce it, so a centralized list needs to be created. For telemarketing this is done with a do-not-call list, and for snailmail it is done with the DMA opt-out list, both of which I've signed up for, and both of which work reasonably well, though not completely.
There is the issue of how much spam is used to "advertise" legitimate businesses. Rather a lot of it appears to involve things which are not legal in the first place.
Except I don't get hundreds or thousands of snail mail spam. Actually here in the UK there is a mailing and telephone preference scheme to opt out of most of these.
This is because these activities tend to cost the sender real money. They need to pay for printing and postage or telephone calls and people to make calls. With email (and fax) you can end up with a great proportion of the cost being paid by other parties (including the recipient). It's a lot easier to trick a computer into sending spam than it would be to get a call centre of sell your stuff without paying them.
And when you start doing that, here's what you'll hear:
"I'm sorry, the government of Angola refused to serve your search warrant. Your money trail hit a dead end."
Depends how much money and hardware is available. The response could be "This is the US Department of Drug Enforcement, Homeland Security and Spam Control; do you really think the Angolan Airforce is up to stopping us from just bombing the terrorists, er sorry spammers, whenever we feel like it?"
You can only reliably follow the money within one country's legal system. As such, spammers would simply move part of their money trail into another country and continue to spam. Without the ability to actually follow the money trail you can't go after the money when it comes back to the US (or whatever country you are in).
The US is hardly well known for respecting international borders. Also what would happen if someone in the US tried to use their credit card to mailorder something from Cuba?
Because enforcing laws against spam are like enforcing laws against oral sex. How exactly do you plan to track down and punish lawbreakers without big brother style surveillance?
Generally spammers are trying to sell something. Thus the method is one of "follow the money". Law enforcement already has tools to do this, just a matter of applying them to the task in hand. (Rather than hassling people who have inherited/won a lottery.)
I think this article has it backwards. Spammers often times will go after your secondary MX records instead of your primary.
If the "secondaries" are on the same network as the "primary" (even the same machine). Then all you need do is modify things such that they will not respond to anything which didn't try the "primary" first...
Firewalls and anti-spam appliances have often very broken SMTP implementations, and not only do they have bad support (when you report it is broken, you get a "it works with most servers so it must be YOUR server that is broken!")
Sounds a bit like the problem with poorly configured web servers displaying the HTML source. (Except with MSIE because it dosn't obey the standards.)
This does not only affect greylisting. I have seen bad SMTP bugs in NAI's virus checker, "SurfControl E-mail Filter", "logsat spamfilter for ISP", and another spamfilter whose name I forgot.
More to the point these systems will break in all plenty of perfectly normal situations.
It often is near impossible to submit a bug report when you are not a user of their product,
If they "eat their own dogfood" they might have difficult reading any emails sent to them.
What's needed is to push on the SEC to find out who's behind the stock spams. They can do it. The number of people buying those penny stocks before the spam started is tiny, and following the money will eventually lead to the spammer. Yes, they may be working through intermediaries, but that's what FinCen and the money-laundering people trace all the time.
If anything this is more a law enforcement than a technical problem.
For the SEC, this is a low priority. They have scams in the billion dollar range, like Enron, WorldCom, etc. to deal with. The typical stock spam makes the spammer a few thousand dollars.
But if they run enough scams they will make quite a bit more. Was there much interest in Enron, WorldCom, etc before they were reported in the media? The basic problem appears to be a lack of law enforcement specifically targeting corporate criminals, why this should be is anyone's guess.
I want that receipt for my airplane ticket right now, not in a few {minutes, hours, whatever}
Whilst this may happen there are plenty of reasons for it not happening. Including having outgoing email checked by a human being and sent as a batch job.
We have no way of knowing how many legitimate delivery failures are caused by greylisting. That's because, as the parent points out, messages are rejected a priori and there's no quarantine to check. If you reject and for whatever reason it is not retransmitted, your mail is lost.
Greylisting sends back a response which says "I can't process this now" try later. There are plenty of other reasons for an SMTP transaction to return this kind of response.
Maybe this "shouldn't" happen but it does, and it happens often enough that it is not entirely obvious that its false positive rate is less than that of a spam filter.
A "false positive" in this context is indictative of a broken MTA.
In this particular case, it's a matter of knowing what to look for. To kids, they think they know how to spot an untrustworthy person.
This is hardly unique to "kids" plenty of people who think they know how to spot untrustworthy people turn out to be unable to do so...
No teenage girl with the hots for a 28 year old wants to be told that he's bad news. Won't matter what you tell her, quite often, a girl who has made up her mind won't change it just because her parents say to.
Indeed her parents trying to change her mind may make her less likely to change it. Especially if their behaviour appears irrational to her.
It's going to take some kind of watershed case for OS manufacturers, application makers, web site builders, etc to finally get the picture that they need to open up portholes into their software to allow parents to gather information about their children in order to make informed decisions.
Which could easily make any problem worst. i.e. how do they verify that the users of these "portholes" arn't child molesters. Especially given that large proportion of child molesters are parents in the first place...
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But he comes to the exact opposite conclusion one should come to. The constitution doesn't grant rights, it merely protects them.
Actually it does grant rights, only to the US Federal Government.. Most of these have quite a few conditions attached too.
It clearly says "in case of invasion." We're invading Iraq, aren't we? The founding fathers couldn't have actually meant to limit the power of the president.
But Iraq hasn't invaded the US. Also there's the additional precondition of public safety requiring it.
The Bush administration is the most corrupt administration the U.S. has ever had.
Rather at least the most overtly corrupt. Maybe it's more a case of improved communications exposing this corruption, whilst the administration is still in office...
The problem is that you have an old and ambiguously worded constitution
Actually the US Consitution is written in more or less "plain English". The problem is simply one of age. With the common meaning of some words (not always the dictionary definition) having changed in the intervening time.
that is being treated as a religious text, interpreted by various "high priests".
Rather than it being interpreted by the public.
You know, who ever declared that Alberto Gonzales has the right to live? Anyone?
Quite the contrary. The penalty for treason is hanging. Don't they swear them in with an oath to protect the Constitution?
If a government official enguages in treason then the actual offence is "High Treason". Whilst capital punishment tends to be the sentence here it need to be restricted to hanging.
See I could have said Repblicans and got modded up. ;-)
What about "Republicrats" or "Democans"? No body's yet asked if these programs have an IQ higher or lower than the average Congresscritter. Possibly more relevent if they are cheaper to bribe...
Or stopped being obsessed about their kid not seeing any sex or violence. It's not going to kill them or damage them or pervert them unless they're the victim. And even then they are likely to survive it and be okay eventually.
What "kids shouldn't see" tends to be very ethnocentric. If some cultures it's sex in others it's violence. Also inculded are factors such as "cartoon" violence or "clean" violence (which dosn't show any bodies) is ok, but violence showing actual injury is not.
Of course the ultimate example here is violent "sport" equals "family entertainment" and accidental (brief) showing of a woman's nipple in the midpoint entertainment for the same sport equals massive fines to broadcaster.
Not very, but it easily surpasses the kind of parent that needs one.
But what matters more is the intelligence of the child it is "supervising"...
It seems they do not understand that a communicating piece of software may not only cause problems for its users, but also for the people that communicate with it (the other end).
:)
If they understood that they'd probably also understand that a "communicating piece of software" should follow the specifications for the communication protocol(s) it perports to use
If you're seriously suggesting bombing a country in order to stop spam, please seek professional help.
In terms of actual harm to Americans spam is rather more of a problem than the various excuses the US had recently been using to bomb places.
As for the real world, if you blow the crap out of Angola, the spammers move on to another country.
Yet the US Government dosn't see this as a problem with "Al Quada"...
Directly? The transaction doesn't go through. The bank would refuse it. However, if you really wanted a Cuban product, you could pay someone in Canada to buy it for you and ship it to you.
Thus the same can be done for spammers. Except that whilst Canadians think embagoing Cuba is daft they might be more receptive to stopping real criminals.
The most likely response would be that all the spammers would move to a country the US would never bomb or embargo (I.E. the one the US Government had been illegally throwing money at.)
You have a right to free speech, but you DON'T have a right to be heard. In other words, you cannot use forceful or otherwise subversive methods to "ensure your speech is heard."
Such "subversive" methods would include misrepresenting what you are doing and trespassing on private property.
If someone doesn't want to hear it, that take precedence over anyone's right to free speech.
They have the right to ignore you, go somewhere you can't go or respond to whatever you are saying.
First, I agree that only I should decide what I'm interested in. I don't want spam to be illegal in the sense that someone else decides what is okay to mail, but rather that it should be illegal to mail me stuff if I've requested that you don't. Because after I request that you don't, it starts becoming harassment. Of course with spam there are so many people doing it that asking each one individually wouldn't do a thing to reduce it, so a centralized list needs to be created. For telemarketing this is done with a do-not-call list, and for snailmail it is done with the DMA opt-out list, both of which I've signed up for, and both of which work reasonably well, though not completely.
There is the issue of how much spam is used to "advertise" legitimate businesses. Rather a lot of it appears to involve things which are not legal in the first place.
Except I don't get hundreds or thousands of snail mail spam. Actually here in the UK there is a mailing and telephone preference scheme to opt out of most of these.
This is because these activities tend to cost the sender real money. They need to pay for printing and postage or telephone calls and people to make calls. With email (and fax) you can end up with a great proportion of the cost being paid by other parties (including the recipient). It's a lot easier to trick a computer into sending spam than it would be to get a call centre of sell your stuff without paying them.
And when you start doing that, here's what you'll hear:
"I'm sorry, the government of Angola refused to serve your search warrant. Your money trail hit a dead end."
Depends how much money and hardware is available. The response could be "This is the US Department of Drug Enforcement, Homeland Security and Spam Control; do you really think the Angolan Airforce is up to stopping us from just bombing the terrorists, er sorry spammers, whenever we feel like it?"
You can only reliably follow the money within one country's legal system. As such, spammers would simply move part of their money trail into another country and continue to spam. Without the ability to actually follow the money trail you can't go after the money when it comes back to the US (or whatever country you are in).
The US is hardly well known for respecting international borders. Also what would happen if someone in the US tried to use their credit card to mailorder something from Cuba?
Because enforcing laws against spam are like enforcing laws against oral sex. How exactly do you plan to track down and punish lawbreakers without big brother style surveillance?
Generally spammers are trying to sell something. Thus the method is one of "follow the money". Law enforcement already has tools to do this, just a matter of applying them to the task in hand. (Rather than hassling people who have inherited/won a lottery.)
I think this article has it backwards. Spammers often times will go after your secondary MX records instead of your primary.
If the "secondaries" are on the same network as the "primary" (even the same machine). Then all you need do is modify things such that they will not respond to anything which didn't try the "primary" first...
Firewalls and anti-spam appliances have often very broken SMTP implementations, and not only do they have bad support (when you report it is broken, you get a "it works with most servers so it must be YOUR server that is broken!")
Sounds a bit like the problem with poorly configured web servers displaying the HTML source. (Except with MSIE because it dosn't obey the standards.)
This does not only affect greylisting. I have seen bad SMTP bugs in NAI's virus checker, "SurfControl E-mail Filter", "logsat spamfilter for ISP", and another spamfilter whose name I forgot.
More to the point these systems will break in all plenty of perfectly normal situations.
It often is near impossible to submit a bug report when you are not a user of their product,
If they "eat their own dogfood" they might have difficult reading any emails sent to them.
But if email sending were non-free, would it affect spammers given that they send their email via botnets anyway?
Hence the "not free" appears to be more along the line of spammers getting arrested.
What's needed is to push on the SEC to find out who's behind the stock spams. They can do it. The number of people buying those penny stocks before the spam started is tiny, and following the money will eventually lead to the spammer. Yes, they may be working through intermediaries, but that's what FinCen and the money-laundering people trace all the time.
If anything this is more a law enforcement than a technical problem.
For the SEC, this is a low priority. They have scams in the billion dollar range, like Enron, WorldCom, etc. to deal with. The typical stock spam makes the spammer a few thousand dollars.
But if they run enough scams they will make quite a bit more.
Was there much interest in Enron, WorldCom, etc before they were reported in the media?
The basic problem appears to be a lack of law enforcement specifically targeting corporate criminals, why this should be is anyone's guess.
One of the great features of email is immediacy.
This is not in the spec.
I want that receipt for my airplane ticket right now, not in a few {minutes, hours, whatever}
Whilst this may happen there are plenty of reasons for it not happening. Including having outgoing email checked by a human being and sent as a batch job.
We have no way of knowing how many legitimate delivery failures are caused by greylisting. That's because, as the parent points out, messages are rejected a priori and there's no quarantine to check. If you reject and for whatever reason it is not retransmitted, your mail is lost.
Greylisting sends back a response which says "I can't process this now" try later. There are plenty of other reasons for an SMTP transaction to return this kind of response.
Maybe this "shouldn't" happen but it does, and it happens often enough that it is not entirely obvious that its false positive rate is less than that of a spam filter.
A "false positive" in this context is indictative of a broken MTA.
The smartest criminals are so deft at their art that no one, least of all the police, is aware that a crime has even taken place...
Then there are those who work for the police.
Although somebody getting caught with wads of cash in their freezer can make one reconsider that statement...
:)
They must have suspected the money was "hot" though
how sweet, the ignorance of youth. They're almost begging for police to come get them.
Maybe they mistook "America's Dumbest Criminals" for some kind of reality TV show you need to apply to...
In this particular case, it's a matter of knowing what to look for. To kids, they think they know how to spot an untrustworthy person.
This is hardly unique to "kids" plenty of people who think they know how to spot untrustworthy people turn out to be unable to do so...
No teenage girl with the hots for a 28 year old wants to be told that he's bad news. Won't matter what you tell her, quite often, a girl who has made up her mind won't change it just because her parents say to.
Indeed her parents trying to change her mind may make her less likely to change it. Especially if their behaviour appears irrational to her.
It's going to take some kind of watershed case for OS manufacturers, application makers, web site builders, etc to finally get the picture that they need to open up portholes into their software to allow parents to gather information about their children in order to make informed decisions.
Which could easily make any problem worst. i.e. how do they verify that the users of these "portholes" arn't child molesters. Especially given that large proportion of child molesters are parents in the first place...